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Karina, Otávia and Saulo from English VI




Which English do you speak?



If a British person comes to an American store asking “Can you give me a rubber?”.
What do you think the seller would offer to him? If he’s an American seller he will give the customer a condom. But if he is a British seller, he will give the costumer a material to erase pencil marks, that is what the British costumer really wanted. We have a funny situation like this one in the movie (or film as you wish) “Outsourced” at which an American manager of a call center needs to train a team of Indian workers who need to speak with American accent. Those are two situations where speakers have a misunderstanding because they use two different versions of the English language. They can’t communicate with the same language! How is this possible?
Today we have millions of speakers worldwide which have English as a native or foreign language, and a huge variety of English Standards as shown in Fig. 1. But in 1900, the only Standard English was the so called Queen’s or King’s English. After the World War II the American Standard English (AmSE) has gained importance besides the British Standard English (BrSE). By the closing decade of the 20th century, these two Standard Englishes had to co-exist with many other Englishes worlwide as, for example, in Australia, India, Canada, Philippines, and so on (See Fig. 2). Nowadays, the diversity of Standard Englishes is rapidly growing, as more and more people in the World need to make business, learn, travel, etc. using English. The communication between English users seems to be more effective by the written word than by speaking (McArthur, 2001).


Figure 1. Differents Standard Englishes spoken around the World.

Figure 2. Countries with the most English language speakers.


Different countries have different accents, vocabulary and grammatical rules. Thus, English students face a hard decision about which Standard English they should learn. The students who have business or professional purposes need to have an awareness of both American and British Standard English. Besides, they need a modest capacity to modify their writting style between AmSE and BrSE whenever necessary.
After all, what English do we need to speak? No matter the one you choose, communication is more important.

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