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Globalization and Multicultural Communication

Unity in Diversity

Department of English Language and Applied Linguistics, Universiti Brunei Darussalam, nihalani{at}fass.ubd.edu.bn

Communication is one of the keywords of the global age. The ever-increasing use of English as a World language has clearly meant that British RP and American Standard English (GA) are no longer seen as the models that learners aspire to. With the global spread of English, three major related questions come to our mind: (a) diversity and multicultural identity, (b) mutually intelligible international communication, and lastly (c) the pedagogical issue of an educational target for global communication.

After a critical examination of the impact of globalization on the educational patterns in general and English language teaching in particular, this paper focuses on the intercultural communication in the global context, and examines the three much-debated major related issues of `comprehensibility', `intelligibility' and `interpretability' from the perspectives of linguistics and social psychology. Quantitative acoustic data from the Expanding Circle (Japanese English), the Outer Circle (Indian English, Malaysian English, Singapore English, Brunei English, Nigerian English, etc.), and the Inner Circle (British English, Scottish English and American English) will be presented. In conclusion, a pragmatic model that is informed by the multi-dimensional view of intelligibility and, more importantly, multicultural interpretability will be discussed in order to address the third major concern of language standardization for global communication.

Key Words: communication • comprehensibility • connectivity • diversity • globalization • intelligibility • interdependence • interpretability • socio-phonetics.

RELC Journal, Vol. 39, No. 2, 242-261 (2008)
DOI: 10.1177/0033688208092187


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