English in Asia Thuyết trình môn đa dạng tiếng anh

Group 5


South Asia
South-East Asia


 The languages of South Asia
South Asia is home to hundreds of different languages.
Many features of the Indo-Aryan language are similar to
those of European languages, such as noun gender and
various declensions of nouns inflected for subject and
no subject cases. Tense, case, and prepositions are all
indicated by affixes in Dravidian languages.


History
 As it gradually assumed responsibility for civil government

and education, the company government was divided into
'orientalists' who favored education in local languages like
Persian, Sanskrit, and 'westernisers' who favored English
language education.

 By the time of Macaulay's Minute English had become

necessary for career success, and so education in English
was taken up quite widely, English has become the common
language of the elite.

 At the end of nineteenth century, due to the development of

IT and data processing expertise gave a boost to English in
India.


The current situation
For other South Asians, proficiency in
English varies widely and the education
system is the main source of input.
Finally, a proportion of South Asians use
spoken English in daily life, people use
English to show off as a mark their age or
position.


Salient features

Shortlist of particularly salient features of South
Asian English:

Retroflex stops for /d/ and /t/: these are the
stereotype feature of the variety
Syllable-timing, and relatively lightly marked
word stress
Intonation characterized by rather short
intonation units (so that the placement of
sentence stress may seem uninformative)


Phonology

The phonology of South Asian English depends on the substratum and on the degree of accommodation to
RP (or nowadays GA): speakers of different South Asian languages will have different accents, and
consequently, as in Britain and the USA, many speakers have strongly regional accents which are hard for
outsiders to understand.
South Asian English has a number of characteristic prosodic features, but these are not very well described.


Grammar
As with other outer-circle varieties, published written usage
shows relatively more syntactic differences from British and
American standard than they have from each other.
This means that we can find written varieties which are very close
grammatically to British usage, some that differ noticeably, and
some that differ so much that they are nonstandard.


Many of the characteristic lexical items of
South Asian English are borrowed BONFIRE NIGHT words referring to local
phenomena.
Others use English elements.
Most tautonyms (ROBIN words, that is,
words that have different meanings in two
varieties) are English words adapted with a
different meaning.
There is also a heteronymic compounding
element – the borrowed form wallah
(3.2.4.1) which forms nouns meaning
'person associated with' and so is
equivalent to suffixes like -ite and -ian in
other varieties.

 Style and pragmatics
The stylistic values attached to words and expressions are often different in Indian English from those in
British or American usage, or perhaps stylistic distinctions are neutralized.
The pragmatics of English in the subcontinent derive, of course, from the subcontinental cultures, and so
pragmatic behavior may be very different from British The outer circle 151 or American.

Even where two cultures create the same niche for an utterance, they may use different verbalization in it.


Hong kong
Malaysia
Phillipines
China
Singapore
etc


.Hong Kong, China
Hong Kong, officially the Hong Kong Special
Administrative Region of the People's Republic
of China (HKSAR), is a metropolitan area and
special administrative region of China on the
eastern Pearl River Delta in South China.

With over 7.5 million residents of various
nationalities in a 1,104-square-kilometre
territory, Hong Kong is one of the most densely
populated places in the world.

 _Malaysia is a country in Southeast Asia.
 _The federal constitutional monarchy consists of thirteen states and three federal

territories, separated by the South China Sea into two regions, Peninsular Malaysia and
Borneo's East Malaysia.
 _Kuala Lumpur is the national capital, largest city, and the seat of the legislative branch
of the federal government. With a population of over 32 million, Malaysia is the world's
43rd-most populous country.


 _The Philippines officially the Republic of the Philippines is an

archipelagic country in Southeast Asia and the world's twelfth most
populous country.
 _Manila is the nation's capital, while the largest city is Quezon City,
both lying within the urban area of Metro Manila.


 Singapore officially the Republic of Singapore is a sovereign island city-state in

maritime Southeast Asia.
 The country's territory is composed of one main island, 63 satellite islands, and
islets, and one outlying islet, the combined area of which has increased by 25%
since the country's independence as a result of extensive land reclamation projects.
 It also has the second greatest population density in the world.


BACKGROUND

 Singapore is a developed country with levels of

education that are among the highest in the world (and
with infrastructure, computer use, health, welfare, and
so on at or above European and North American levels).
 Hong Kong is a fully developed world financial and

business center with a high standard of living.
 Malaysia is a rapidly developing ‘Asian tiger’ economy.
 The Philippines are poorer, but better off in terms of

average income than the African or South Asian
countries.


 _These are usually:
 + not tonal (unlike Bantu languages and

Chinese)
 +have polysyllabic words which may have
inflections
 + phonology with few consonant clusters
and relatively fewer consonants than English.
 → In Malaysia (and Singapore) the
precolonial language was Malay, which in its
modern standardized form has many
loanwords from Sanskrit, Arabic, and English,
and often coins words from Sanskrit roots as
English does from Latin or Greek.
 → In Singapore, most younger people

have, however, adopted Mandarin, alongside
English, as their preferred language.


 Cantonese and the other ‘dialects’

are:
 + tonal
 +typically have words of one or two
syllables with few or no inflections
 + have few consonant clusters and
few possible final consonants.
 → Most people in modern Singapore,
and many in Malaysia, are of Chinese
descent and speak Cantonese or
Hokkien or another ‘dialect’ of Chinese
as their ancestral language.


 During the twentieth century the Malay

peninsula was a multilingual society.

 English was spread by the education system

and educated people became very fluent
because they used the language for
everyday communication across communal
boundaries.

 Knowledge of English was spread almost

entirely through the education system, which
increasingly used English as a medium.

 In 1898 ownership of the Philippines passed

to the USA.


 The former British possessions in the area are

mostly now part of Malaysia.
 English is now used for some tertiary education,
and quite widely as the language of business, where
many firms are still dominated by Chinese or Indian
personnel.
 English is frequently used in workplaces, often with

variation between standard and more localized
forms and codeswitching into Malay according to
situation and conversational partner


 Singapore, with a population speaking a variety of Chinese ‘dialects’, Indian languages and local

Malay, emphasized English as the main official language. It has subsequently moved towards a
policy which aims at the Chinese community dropping the ‘dialects’ and becoming bilingual in
Mandarin Chinese (the official language of mainland China and Taiwan) and English, Indians in
an Indian language and English, and Malays in Bahasa Malaysia and English.

In Singapore an increasing proportion of speakers have English as a mother tongue – but the
local variety rather than Standard English.


 Hong Kong was returned to Chinese sovereignty in 1997.

Today, English is very widely used in the education and legal systems and
to deal with international business, and is becoming ‘localised’, and used
to some extent for everyday interaction among locals who all speak
Cantonese


 The vowel inventory is quite

reduced, CLOTH, THOUGHT, CURE,
and NORTH / FORCE and
START/PALM/BATH are all merged
FACE and GOAT are monophthongs,
as in many other varieties, and
Detering notes that a diphthongal
pronunciation of the FACE vowel
sounds 'affected' to Singaporeans.

 He also observes that lexical

distribution is not always as
expected.

 In particular egg and bed have the

FACE vowel, not that of DRESS, so
that they do not rhyme with peg and
fed.

 Dental fricatives are often realized as

stops. A number of words have local
stress patterns, some of which, like
purchase, look like regularisation
based on the spelling


Basipetal and mesolectal Singapore-Malaysian English differs rather
dramatically from the standard in terms of syntax.

Subjects and objects can be omitted where they are clear from the
context, as in Chinese and MalayFor example as an answer to the question
Do you get overtime pay, or can you take time off in lieu? Richards
(1977:79) recorded You want to overtime also can, take off, also can.
‘If you want (to take) overtime, you can, but if you want to take time
off, you can do that too’
Correspondingly, as in Chinese, Malay, and many creoles, be as copula
(and auxiliary) can be omitted. Richards asked It’s pretty quiet running
this car park at night, isn’t it? And received the answer This one Ø
near the shopping centre, night club, there the good business Ø, that

Ø why the government operate the parking here. <=> ‘No, it is near
the shopping centre and night clubs, there’s good business there,
that’s why the government has a parking lot here.’

 Gupta (1994) says that the syntax of questions in Singapore Colloquial English – what we are

calling the basilect and mesolect – is simpler than that in Standard English and also than that in
Malay and Chinese. Question words other than why and how are not usually fronted, and
inversion(đảo ngữ) is only usual when the verb has the BE or CAN auxiliaries, so that the
following question forms are normal:
 Why you take so many?
 Go where?
 She eat what?
 In Chinese and
 South-East Asian languages questions often include the equivalent of or (not)? as a question
word, and correspondingly local English often has questions like Want or not? You want tea or
what? Can or not? Pain or not?