English – familiar or foreign language ?

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I have no memory of learning to speak English as such. It is my mother tongue and was there as a given in a family where it was the only language we all spoke. After all these years, it has become an object which I can now also contemplate as a foreign language, a medium which I can visit, explore, use, leave, then come back to as required. Unless – unknown to me – it was simply foreign right from the beginning?

How can English change from being a familiar to a foreign language? As I write this, there are about 400 million other people in the world whose first language is English, and there are a further 1.1 billion for whom it is a second or foreign language. English is the official language in 57 sovereign states and the working language in 15 countries. If that sounds like a lot, then try this : when members of these various groups of English-speakers start interacting with members of the same group or with members of other groups, they all influence each other’s English. This promises a potential mix of new combinations in numbers which are mind-boggling. There’s a lot of English about and the constantly changing mix, particularly if you look at it from abroad, keeps it foreign.

Growing up I was constantly drawn to the music of language, particularly in its oral form¹. When I say language, of course, I mean English. I loved all its different accents and tried to imitate them, while also developing a taste for all forms of wordplay and an ear for narrative. It appeared to me then that, although we all shared the single apparently monolithic English language at home, at school, in our neighbourhood and in the wider world, everyone had their own way of using it. Picking up on this helped me able to tune into the unusual ways in which others used the language. It was like travelling to a foreign country without having to learn another language but simply reshape one which I already knew.

Learning to tell the foreign from the familiar

When do we learn to distinguish the familiar from the foreign in a language? In a 2019 study carried out at Essex University Ella Jeffries has shown that preschool children are able to categorize speakers by regional accent. This suggests that our ears are trained early in life not only to spot people who speak like us, but also to identify people who speak differently. We’re even able to classify them into groups along with other people who speak like them. This geography of sound creates a mind-map of accents which creates resources which an imitator draws on when enjoying putting on an accent from elsewhere.

Acute awareness of such differences, when put in an educational context, can help learners to improve and enrich the way they use the language because it can enable them to switch codes depending on how they need to sound. This can affect not just the words they use but also tone, register and grammar. A current BBC page of activities exploring the differences between Standard and Non-Standard English for 7 to 9 year-olds presents this ability to differentiate as a life-skill : individuals no longer have a default way of using the language but know how to adapt how they express themselves to the social context in which they are speaking.

If you don’t like the term Standard English or feel it is subtly being presented as the only option, I suggest turning to the work of sociolinguist Peter Trudgill who has no hesitation in answering back concerning the desirability of learning only Standard English. He argues that so-called Standard English is not the benchmark version of the language but simply a dialect, a version of English spoken by certain people belonging to the same group : “Standard English is not the English language but simply one variety of it.”²

Encounters with other versions of English

In two other posts on this blog, I have written about childhood encounters with English in situations of primary orality. One describes seeing a card-sharp at work on a London street and reflects on the mastery of a street speaker who always seems to know where he wants his listeners to focus and never loses his flow. The other post gives examples of the magic of the seller’s pitch on a street market in Harlow which charms people into spending their money.

What was I looking for in such encounters? Why do I still remember them? Both encounters provided language outside the norm. They were alternative varieties to the English of home or school or neighbourhood friends and their families. And I can now see this childhood appetite for other versions of English was preparation for being able to work with English as a phenomenal, foreign, loveable, learnable language in the classroom. I immediately felt at home.

Why was all that stuff of interest to me as a child ? I could have let it pass me by, but I didn’t. I stopped, I looked closer and needed to take it in. Something similar would happen when I moved on to university and discovered Old and Middle English which gave me the keys to the story of how English had developed and changed over centuries by mixing the local and the foreign to create the version we know today. This turned out to be essential for future encounters with the versions of English in the making which the world of teaching it as a foreign language would provide as my daily diet.

Mother tongue and father tongue

Ultimately, maybe all this interest in these other versions of English was simply a search for variations on what I picked up at home : the way both parents speak and use a language has to be a major influence on how people acquire it. I look in more detail at the English my parents spoke and where it came from in two portraits available here – one is called English mother tongue, and the other is English father tongue. You can read English

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1. More details on this here. ↩︎
2. From Standard English : what it isn’t. ↩︎