New Englishes Norms: A Reality or an Intellectual Ideal?

Abstract

It is now widely accepted that English does not belong to the traditional native speaker countries such as the UK or the USA, and that English across the world has diversified and established roots in different parts of the world. Given this, studies have emerged, that focus on New Englishes being systems unto themselves, and not merely erroneous versions of more traditional “native” Englishes (Rajagopalan, 2012). Scholars today are calling for descriptions of New Englishes to form the bases of New English handbooks, which, they claim, could serve as pedagogical models. Linguists like Lange (2011) and Kachru (1994) and literary figures such as Salman Rushdie alike have called for the recognition of New Englishes to be accepted and used in order to better reflect the global nature of the language The aim of this study is to determine whether new international varieties of English are acceptable among language teachers. Specifically, the paper investigates how acceptable certain well-documented New Englishes structures are among English language professionals working at the tertiary level in the Arab world and North America. The results show that while participants are, in general, more tolerant of New English structures in students’ spoken forms than in both students and their own written forms, they stated that they would not use any of the structures in their own writing. Results also show that the respondents’ native language, specialization and educational qualifications are factors that impact their acceptance of these forms.