There are those who - to my dismay and surprise - question whether regional English accents should be discouraged
I may have a two pence's worth of opinion on this vexed question vexed only if you limit your views based on the linguistics of the English language as spoken within the geographical limits of the US of A.
I take the position which covers the entire Anglophone planet Earth.
Doing that, I find that it is not at all a vexed question!
I encourage the various regional accents of English, throughout the world.
This English, as it is spoken to-day, that it has so many variations in usage and pronunciation, is a matter of joy and celebration!
It occurs to have so many kinds and manners of speech because of the natural progression of its expansion on this planet throughout the last five centuries as recorded and counted by means of the Gregorian Calendar..
I haven't had the time to read all 41 opinions so far entered in the debate, either pro or contra. Perhaps I am already repeating what has been propounded before my input on this matter.
Yet I continue, perhaps there is something which will be of value in the things I feel I need to tell you, and all of us, in this English speaking world of ours.
There is another limit to the hope of my opinion being taken seriously.
I am only a user of English, in daily life, and on an international scale, by means of my input in Helium.com.
I use other languages as well; 12 more ( twelve) languages I have at my disposal, in varying and descending level of fluency and daily use.
Let me tell now that I gained knowledge of those languages by picking them up like birds pick up seed whilst in flight.
I have no academic qualifications at all...
This is the time you might wish to stop reading and dismiss my opinion as worthless.
I do know what philology means, and I have proved I can spell this word correctly.
For those who feel that English should be spoken only in the manner it is spoken in England, I find that this position can be immediately contradicted, by a choice.
England has many more kinds of English spoken daily by the 50 odd millions of its people, than most of us English speaking people in the world are aware of !
Immediately this raises the question: Which English language spoken in England do you mean?
In that small number of people who live in the British Isles perhaps a bit more than 50 million souls there are so many variations of English that the people of the far North will have trouble to understand those of the far South of the big island.
I am sure that many people have heard that History repeats itself.
It has happened before.
Languages are living things. They change. They grow up. They die. They mix, upward through the time of ages, and sideways through the normal movements of people going to live somewhere else, bringing their own language, and within 40 or 50 years their own, original language has changed because the owners have adopted local expressions, thus changing their own languages and the borrowers of the new language had taken over and malformed the new language to suit their own manner of saying and pronouncing things and thus English' has picked up a new 'variation.'
It happens all the time.
Look at Europe of to-day, there is a welter of mutually foreign languages, in an area a bit smaller than the stretch of land in the US of America.
But English used to be a basic language, before it was brought to what we now call England, from a land in Europe, which we now call Germany, the land of the Germans, who themselves came from God knows where- for I surely don't - , whilst they called themselves Allemanni.
In to-day's France they still call the Germans Allemands. Does ring a bell don't it?
And why is France called France?
Because it used to be inhabited by the Franks, a tribe that used to live over the East side of the river Rhine, and when reaching and moving into Gaul,"they moved inturn further West and landed in what is now Wales. But the French still call them Galles or Gaulles.
So, to reassure people who think that things are on a slide when they hear people speak a funny sort of English. Not to worry.
It still is English, but not for long. In about two hundred years you will find that the English language of to-day, for example in Nigeria has become something totally different.
Like what happened to Latin Europe.
By the year 400 AD the Romans had to return to their original lands, what we now call Italy. But the Roman language they left behind in the Land of the Franks had become a Romance language, like the language of Spain and Portugal, all provinces of the old Roman empire. And in their own country the current language is Italian, surely a far cry from the original Latin. And how many Latin words don't we use in to-day's English? If I remember correctly, when still learning at school, about 40 % of the current English vocabulary is Latin-based...
Like the language of Brasil, the people there still call it Portugues, but the people of Portugal have big trouble to understand Brasillian Portuguese
I believe I made my point.
Let English live its natural life.
Let English, in whichever manner it is spoken, be spoken beautifully.
Let English sound the way it wants to sound.
Let English sound the way it needs to sound.
Let English be the polite language spoken by polite people, any way it sounds, all over the world.
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