Non-inner Circle Englishes Versus Language Errors
This chapter focuses on the need to distinguish between features of an established variety of English versus features which could be claimed to be ‘pure errors’. In relation to this, we need to reconsider terminologies and audience: Chinglish arguably ref
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4.1 Errors Versus Non-standard Usage in Inner Circle English Before discussing the distinction between errors and innovations from the perspective of NICE, this section serves to briefly set the scene by discussing the matter from the perspective of inner circle English. Thus, this section serves in part to provide evidence of the grey area that exists within inner circle Englishes, namely linguistic features that straddle the border between error and innovation and thus make classification difficult. The overall purpose, however, is to reveal how the concept of what is an error versus an innovation might be made more concrete, certainly for inner circle readers, by means of bringing it to a more familiar linguistic home, yet one that can be compared with the non-inner circle context. I begin with three examples to illustrate: I know he doesn’t think he’s better than the rest of us. % I know he don’t think he better than the rest of us. * He can swims. © The Author(s) 2019 A. Baratta, World Englishes in English Language Teaching, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-13286-6_4
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The first example is standard English, which would be regarded as the standard form for all inner circle Englishes. The fact that contractions are used (doesn’t, he’s) does not make the sentence any less standard, merely less formal, and so this is also tied to register. The second example is non-standard, symbolised by the use of the adjacent symbol—%. Specifically, the sentence is an example of the Ebonics dialect and thus, it is conforming to the grammatical rules of that particular language variety, one which is not standard English and as such, it cannot be expected to conform to the rules of standard English. In Ebonics, the verb for third person pronouns is not inflected, and thus the suffix -s is not used with such verbs (and don’t is thus retained for third person verbs). As a result, the following is absolutely fine for Ebonics: He read, she go and he eat. As mentioned previously, Ebonics allows for copula deletion, whereas standard English does not. For this reason, he better is fine, whereas in standard English, we would need to supply an appropriate copula verb: he is better/he’s better. The final sentence is a clear-cut example of a sentence that is clearly wrong for the English language, in a very absolute sense (and an example that I had used previously). It is not wrong merely because it sounds ‘strange’ or because I don’t like it for some reason. Instead, it is wrong on a purely objective level because, to the best of my knowledge, the sentence does not conform to the grammar of any known variety of English at all. If, however, a future group of English speakers, regardless of which circle they reside in, ‘decide’ to inflect (third person) lexical verbs which follow modal verbs, and such a sentence becomes commonly used by said English-speaking community somewhere in the world, then that is a major step towards legitimate, if non-standard, usage. But once again, there are potential pitfalls to be acknow
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