Ângelo Anselmo Morrumbe

Arão Ricardo Manguele

Clédson Gabriel Langa
Daurisio de Crevan Martres
Lucas Alberto Nhamirre
Nélia Nelson Nhoela
Rogério Dioclésio Munguambe

THE REJECTION OF ENGLISH

Licenciatura em Ingles

Universidade Save
Extensão Maxixe
2023
 1

Ângelo Anselmo Morrumbe

Arão Ricardo Manguele
Clédson Gabriel Langa
Daurisio de Crevan Martres
Lucas Alberto Nhamirre
Nélia Nelson Nhoela
Rogério Dioclésio Munguambe

THE REJECTION OF ENGLISH

Assignment designed to the subject of

History of English with purpose of
evaluation.

Lecturer: Dr. Carlos João Rafael

Universidade Save
Extensão Maxixe
2023
 2

Índice
Introduction.................................................................................................................................3
Rejection of English....................................................................................................................4
Contrasting Attitudes: us situation..............................................................................................5
Positions for and against about “official English”......................................................................5
The political Argument: for........................................................................................................5
The Socio- economic argument: for...........................................................................................6
The Socio- economic argument: Against....................................................................................6
Education issues..........................................................................................................................6
Code switching............................................................................................................................7
Linguistics character of new English..........................................................................................9
Grammar...................................................................................................................................10
Vocabulary................................................................................................................................10
Conclusion................................................................................................................................12
Bibliography References...........................................................................................................13
 3

Introduction

At present essay we will discuss about the rejection of English, at this part we will explain the
reasons of why the people of that time were rejecting English because as we know, the British
people were feeling uncomfortable about English language in a post-colonial era, they
decided to reject it to not be an official language or as foreign language if we go further we
will be talking about contrasting attitudes: the US situation, this section deals with definition
of contrasting and also talk about attitude where we will see the differences or variations of
sounds into the attitude, contrasting affect and last in this section we will be talking about the
situation that influence the same contrasting attitude. Afterward we will discuss about the new
englishes where we are going to tell its story, principally when it began not only but also we
are going to tell who are the people who introduced the modern English.

At the present section we are going to talk about the linguistics characters of new englishes
 4

Rejection of English

When the people started not to feel comfortable about English language in a post-colonial era,
they decided to reject it to not be an official language or as foreign language. According to the
book titled English as global language, the president of Kenya, Jomo Kenyatta, said in 1974,
that “The basis of any independent government is a national language, and we can no longer
continue aping our former colonizers”, however, Gandhi (1908) criticized in his writing,
arguing that if he becomes a barrister without speaking mother tongue and somebody else
translating to him, this could be absurd or even a sign of slavery. Thus, English has been
rejected by Ngŭgĭ wa Thiong’o, he was also the author of Kenyan.

According to the book, Gandhi also mentions that European was stealing their talents and
geniuses as they have stolen their economies. Surely, in the XVIII and XIX centuries Europe
has stolen art treasures from Africa to decorate their houses and museums, Instead, Europe is
stealing the treasury of the mind to raise and developing their languages and culture, above
all, these issues above have to do with the who they are and what language they speak.

Gandhi also says that “In Kenya, English became more than a language: it was the language,
and all the others had to bow before it in deference”. He also added by saying that if you are
caught speaking Gikuyu in the vicinity of the school , you would be punished corporately
from three to five strokes of the cane on bare buttocks – or was made to carry a metal plate
around the neck with writing such as I AM STUPID or I AM A DONKEY. By so doing,
English could grow rapidly and whoever writes in English his works have many opportunities
to a worldwide audience; however, writing in English meant sacrificing their cultural
identification. Some formers colony like British Empire remained with English and other
countries like; Malaysia, Tanzania, adopted English as a national language and apart from that
English stared to increase its worthy in many countries. In Algeria in 1996 has adopted
English as educational language.

There were also some economic arguments suggesting that for a country to make its local
language to be a lingua franca like English, mind taking into account it economy future as
developing on regional more than a global level. The book also mentions that the America
could throw their weight behind Spanish that is, the countries of North Africa behind Arabic.
Some countries like Russian, Hindi and Germany have languages which have a traditional
presence within a number of geographically adjacent countries, in a few words, these
 5

countries they would not make part in global economic village, or dismiss the possibility as a
pipe-dream.

Contrasting Attitudes: us situation

Status of English must be bound up to some extent with the future of that country. The US
contains many mother tongue speakers as many others nations it has been more involved with
international developments in twentieth-century technology. And it exercises influence on the
way English is developing worldwide than other regional variety – often, to the people in the
UK, Australia, New Zeeland, Canada and South Africa. I was seen before that there is any
relationship between power and language; many people are learning English in order to get
power. It means that English language plays an important role in the America economy.

Analysis considers the English language to have been an important factor in maintaining
mutual intelligibility and American unity in the face of the immigration explosion which more
than tripled the US population after 1900. Many points were argued to make English as a
global language with varying amounts of moderation and extremism, and several views arised
which others were for and others were against to “English as official language”.

Positions for and against about “official English”

During the 'official English movement, many positions were argued, although the various
arguments are in many ways unique to the USA, given the large numbers of people and
languages involved, and relating as they do to the rights of individuals as enshrined in the US
Constitution, they need to be carefully noted by people in other countries, for ethnic minority
and immigrant populations – and thus the competing pressures of identity preservation vs.
assimilation – are everywhere.

Following will be find that positions for and against the Official English language movement:

The political Argument: for

The supporters in this area look in the emergence of immigrant groups and supports for
immigrant language programs.

From this point of view, English is viewed, according to one pro-official columnist in 1995,
as a social adhesive – as linguistic glue which guarantees political unity. According to
another, the language has been the basis of social stability in the USA, and any threat to this
 6

stabilizing influence would lead to the growth of ‘countries within a country’ – linguistic
ghettos.

The Socio- economic argument: for

Pro-official supporters maintain that, at a time when there is considerable competition for
limited funds, an expensive multilingual support policy is undesirable. In America there are
many languages to be taken into account so they point that no country can take more than
language as official language, do they argue that is better to take English for economy
because it is a very used language in a world.

The Socio- economic argument: Against

Anti-official supporters doubt whether government time and money would really be saved,
given the cost and complexity of introducing the new law. They also point to the difficulties
to give a precise definition of " official because there are many languages that need to be
analyzed and examined so is still Early to take this decision.

Anti-official supporters claim that the withdrawal of resources and the fresh focus on English
is bound to harm the provision of services in these languages, even in areas which are
supposed to be protected, such as health care and law enforcement.

Education issues

Regarding to the Education issues, many arguments are in debate.

Pro- official supporters position is that many students in bilingual education programs are
being taught by teachers whose own level of English is of a low quality, thus inculcating an
inadequate command of the language, and a ‘ghetto dialect’ that will mark the speakers as
socially inferior. They point that few trained teachers of English language.

Anti- official supporters underline the value of bilingualism as part of a child’s learning
experience, observing that immigrant children are more likely to do well in learning a second
language if their own language is valued by the society in which they find themselves.

They accentuate the potential and success of use of bilingualism in education programs.

Anti-official supporters are unconvinced by the pro- official supporters, they held that
“official English movement” is one of unconsciously held, because it seems as a
discrimination of other languages over the world.
 7

Code switching

Code switching was an afrikans noun and also adjective + noun combination. So code
switching is a process which people rely simultaneously on two or more languages to
communicate with each other.

In British English there are instances of clauseor sentence-size chunks being borrowed from a
foreign language (Je ne sais quoi, c’est la vie), so the situations where contact with other
languages is routine and socially pervasive, we would expect this process to appear on a large
scale, and eventually to have a dramatic impact on the character of the language.

The increase in code-switching is evidently one of the most noticeable features of the
situation in which new Englishes are emerging. Any loan-word could be viewed as a
minimalist example of code-switching, but the notion is more persuasive when it is found in
stretches of utterance which can be given a syntactic definition.

McArthur gives an example of a leaflet issued by the Hong Kong Bank in 1994 for Filipino
workers in Hong Kong who sent money home to their families. It is a bilingual leaflet in
English and Tagalog, but in the Tagalog section a great deal of English is mixed in. This kind
of language is often described using a compound main in this case, Tanglish (for Tangalog-
English). It is unclear whether this king of mixing is idiosyncratic to a particular institution,
genre or region, but it illustrates the extent to which is possible to go and still retain an
identity which is at least partly English.

Whether one should call it a variant of English or something else is not yet clear, mixed
varieties involving English are now found anywhere, with colourfull nicknames attached:
Franglais, Tex-Mex, Chinglish, Japlish, Singlish, Denglishor Angleustsch and many more

These terms are now widely used regardless of the direction of the mixing: they have applied
to a variant of a language which has been much anglicized as well as to a variant of English
which has made use of other languages. Wether the direction makes difference to the type of
language used in uncertain. What is important to note is that general attitude towards these
phenomena are slowly changing.

What is important to note is that general attitudes towards these phenomena are slowly
changing (though still receiving much establishment opposition. Formerly, such names were
only ever used as scornful appellations by the general public. People would sneer at Tex-Mex,
and say it was neither one language nor the other, or refer to it as ‘gutter-speak’ used by
 8

people who had not learned to talk properly. But we can hardly call a variety like Taglish
gutter-speak when it is being used in writing by a major banking corporation. And when these
‘mixed’ languages are analyzed, it is found that they are full of great complexity and subtlety
of expression – as we would expect, if people have the resources of two languages to draw
upon, rather than one.

McArthur’s aim was to draw attention to the remarkable ‘messiness’ which characterizes the
current world English situation, especially in second-language contexts. Typically, a New
English is not a homogeneous entity, with clear-cut boundaries, and an easily definable
phonology, grammar and lexicon. On the contrary, communities which are putting English to
use are doing so in several different ways. As McArthur puts it, ‘stability and flux go side by
side, centripetal and centrifugal forces operating at one and the same time’.42 And when
actual examples of language in use are analyzed, in such multilingual settings as Malaysia and

Singapore, all kinds of unusual hybrids come to light. Different degrees of language mixing
are apparent: at one extreme, a sentence might be used which is indistinguishable from
standard

English; at the other, a sentence might use so many words and constructions from a contact
language that it becomes unintelligible to those outside a particular community. In between,
there are varying degrees of hybridization, ranging from the use of a single lexical borrowing
within a sentence to several borrowings, and from the addition of a single borrowed syntactic
construction (such as a tag question) to a reworking of an entire sentence structure. In
addition, of course, the pronunciation shows similar degrees of variation, from a standard
British or American accent to an accent which diverges widely from such standards both in
segmental and non-segmental (intonational, rhythmical) ways.

It is possible to see this within a few lines of conversation, as in this example from Malaysia
(‘Malenglish’), in which two Kuala Lumpur women lawyers are talking. The first speaker is a
Tamil; the second is Chinese; and both have learned English and Malay as additional
languages.

CHANDRA: Lee Lian, you were saying you wanted to go shopping, nak pergi tak?

LEE LIAN : Okay, okay, at about twelve, can or not?

CHANDRA: Can lah, no problem one! My case going to be adjourned anyway.

LEE LIAN : What you looking for? Furnitures or kitchenwares?

 9

You were saying, that day, you wanted to beli some barang-barangfor your new house.

CHANDRA: Yes lah! Might as well go window-shopping a bit at least. No chance to ronda
otherwise. My husband, he got no patience one!

LEE LIAN: You mean you actually think husbands got all that patience ah? No chance man!
Yes or not?

CHANDRA: Betul juga. No chance at all! But if anything to do with their stuff – golf or
snooker or whatever, then dia pun boleh sabar one.

LEE LIAN: Yes lah, what to do? It still is a man’s world, in that sense! Anyway, we better go
now – so late already – wait traffic jam, then real susah!

We can reorganize the data in this extract to show the hybridization. At the top is a sentence
which could be called Standard

Colloquial English; below it are other sentences which show increasing degrees of departure
from this norm, grammatically and lexically. At the bottom is a sentence which is entirely
Colloquial Malay.

The Linguistics character of new English

Several factors where evolved in the English language globalization and many changes
occurred in the globalization, consequently, the English spoken today is somewhat different
from that of the past and it varies from place to place.

Several experiences of new Englishes of the past have been well studied, notably American
and Australian English but the way the language has evolved in settings where most people
are native speakers is likely different from the way it will evolve in settings where most
people are non native speakers. (Crystal. D, 147)

Since a language is dynamic, there many developments taking place in the English language
and many studies have been carried out for the explanation of these phenomena. We will be
focused on the grammatical, vocabulary and code switching of the linguistic character of the
new English.
 10

Grammar

New Englishes have certain formal properties – lexical, phonological, and grammatical – that
differ from those of British or American Standard English. Examples of New Englishes
include Nigerian English, Singapore English, and Indian English.

It is commonly assumed that grammar is a purely verbal science, in which the students is
mainly occupied in learning definitions, paradigms, and rules of syntax, and that it is,
consequently, far inferior as an instrument of mental discipline to natural history and
experimental science.

Any domain of linguistic structure and use could be the basis of variety differentiation, but the
focus in comparing the traditional standards of British and American English has been almost
entirely associated with vocabulary and phonology. There has been little acknowledgement of
grammatical variation in those reference works which incorporate an international
perspective: one grammar, talking about the distinction between British and American
English.

Two points are relevant. First, grammars – especially those motivated by teaching
considerations – have traditionally focused on Standard English, and thus essentially on
printed English, which provides the foundation of that standard. Non-standard varieties are
mentioned only in passing. However, we know from intranational dialectology that it is here
where grammatical distinctiveness is most likely to be found. New Englishes, which like
intranational dialects are very much bound up with issues of local identity, are likely to
display a similar direction of development. Second, because new varieties are chiefly
associated with speech, rather than writing, they have also attracted less attention.

The major difference between the old grammar and modern grammar is that our language has
become less inflective and more isolating. Old grammar used more grammatical endings on
words and so was less dependent on word order and function words than modern grammar.

The influence of the grammar of the written language has thus been pervasive, fuelled by a
strongly prescriptive tradition in schools and an adult reliance on usage manuals which
privileged writing above speech. Grammars totally devoted to speech are rare, and self-
avowedly exploratory. But as English becomes increasingly global, we must expect far more
attention to be paid to speech. Although there is no suggestion anywhere that standard written
English will diminish in importance, and literacy remains a dominant target, there is
 11

increasing evidence of new spoken varieties growing up which are only partly related to the
written tradition and which may even be totally independent of it.

There are certain grammar differences between British and American English. For instance, in
American English, collective nouns are considered singular (e.g. The band is playing). In
contrast, collective nouns can be either singular or plural in British English, although the
plural form is most often used (e.g. The band are playing).

The British are also more likely to use formal speech, such as ‘shall’, whereas Americans
favor the more informal ‘will’ or ‘should’.

Americans, however, continue to use ‘gotten’ as the past participle of ‘get’, which the British
have long since dropped in favor of ‘got’.

‘Needn’t’, which is commonly used in British English, is rarely, if at all used in American
English. In its place is ‘don’t need to’.

Vocabulary

In the case of American English, relatively few of the Amerindian loan-words which are
recorded in the seven-teenth and eighteenth centuries became a permanent part of the standard
language. The others have become obsolete or surviving only in local dialects (e.g. squanters
quash, cock arouse, cantico).

Australia also later demonstrates a similar paucity of indigenous words. On the other hand, the
amount of borrowing from an indigenous language is extremely sensitive to sociopolitical
pressures, as is evident in contemporary New Zealand, where loans from Maori are
increasing.

The amount of borrowing is also influenced by the number of cultures which co-exist, and the
status which their languages have achieved. In a highly multilingual country, such as South
Africa, Malaysia or Nigeria, where issues of identity are critical, we might expect a much
greater use of loan-words.

There was already a salient loan-word presence in South African English, even before the
1994 constitution recognized eleven languages as official (including English). We might
therefore expect the status of these languages to be reflected in due course by a further
significant growth in the number of loan-words into South African English; but the linguistic
outcome will depend on such factors as the extent to which the newfound official status of
 12

these languages is supported by economic and political realities, and the extent to which their
lexical character itself changes as a result of Anglicization. Some cultural domains are likely
to manifest this growth sooner than others – such as restaurant menus. All the standard
processes of lexical creation are encountered when analyzing the linguistic distinctiveness of
New English’s.

Finally, we can illustrate the many examples in which a word or phrase from a well-
established variety is adopted by a New English and given a new meaning or use, without
undergoing any structural change. In Jamaican English, for example, we find such meaning
changes as cockpit (‘type of valley’) and beveragein the restricted sense of ‘lemonade. In
Ghana, we find heavy in the sense of ‘gorgeous’ and brutal in the sense of ‘very nice’, and a
number of semantic shifts, including maiden name meaning ‘given name’ (applied to males)
and linguist meaning ‘spokesman for the chief.

Even in countries where the number of localized words is relatively small, their effect on the
character of the local English can be great, for two reasons. The new words are likely to be
frequently used within the local community, precisely because they relate to distinctive
notions there. And these words tend not to occur in isolation: if a conversation is about, say,
local politics, then the names of several political parties, slogans and other allusions are likely
to come into the same discourse, making it increasingly impenetrable.
 13

Conclusion
Done the assignment we concluded that the rejection of English during the middle ages and
the Renaissance, it’s when Latin and Greek were considered the languages of scholars and
intellectuals. The rejection of English was partly due to the fact that English was not
considered a prestigious language at the time. Latin and Greek were seen as more elevated
and refined languages, English was considered a vulgar language, spoken by common people
and used primarily for everyday communication.

We also viewed that during this period, English was undergoing significant changes, with
many new words and grammatical structures being introduced due to the influence of other
languages and dialects. This made it difficult for scholars to study and understand the English
language, and further contributed to its dismissal as a serious academic subject but over time,
English became more widely studied and appreciated, and today it is one of the most widely
spoken and studied languages in the world.
 14

Bibliography References
CRYSTAL, DAVID. (2 ed.). English as a Global Language. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.

STRATMANN, FRANCIS HENRY. A Middle-English Dictionary: Containing Words Used

by English Writers from the Twelfth to the Fifteenth Century. Rev. Henry Bradley. Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 1986.