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THERE is general, virtually worldwide agreement that English is the closest thing to a world language. Chinese may still be spoken as a first language by more people than any other in the world, but English is by far the most popular second language. (Indeed, there are more Chinese studying English in China than the entire population of the United States.) This claim that English is the world's language emphasizes its present use and its future prospects. What this paper focuses on, however, is the worldliness of the English language itself, as not merely the language of the world but also a language that already contains much of the world in it.
What do I mean by worldliness? There are three ways of being worldly: through universality, widespread comprehensibility, and comprehensivity. Each way is worth its own consideration. Regarding universality, despite the claims of Anglo-American chauvinists, English is far from being a universal language. The closest thing to a universal language is perhaps computer English, which is the standard used by programmers all over the world, regardless of their native language. It is true that more and more of the discourse in scientific, scholarly, and business circles uses English as the medium of communication, but the claim that English is universal is not supported by the low level of command of the millions who profess to know English; nor would most linguists, pure or applied, make that claim.1 I am fond of the story of the modest Japanese businessman who, on being introduced as someone who would offer his keynote speech in English, "the universal language," remonstrated with his host and said, "No, English is not the universal language. 'Broken English' is the universal language."2 Of course, there are universal sublanguages: science and mathematics all over the world have, for more than a millennium, used Arabic numbers. Roman mathematics, I believe, is nonexistent. The irony is that modern science, which is so often vaunted as one of the most impressive accomplishments of Western civilization, would hardly have been possible without the crucial use of Arabic numbers.
We have not returned to the pre-Babelian state of one language for all, and it is not likely, despite the fears of those who deplore the McDonaldization of the world, that we will ever have a universal language. Neither Esperanto nor Interlingua has achieved its aim of replacing native languages. English will be no exception, even though the dominance of English in the modern capitalistic and technological world gives it far greater currency than any other language. A universal language--as opposed to universal sublanguages, such as computer programming and mathematics--does not, and may never, exist.
As for comprehensibility, English cannot be said to be totally satisfactory either. It is certainly less transparent and unambiguous than schematic diagrams or mathematical formulas or chemistry equations. The varieties of English can hardly be said to be mutually comprehensible.3 Wags of assorted chauvinist persuasions have commented on the incomprehensibility of various Englishes, from Cockney to Australian to Brooklyn to Singapore. George Bernard Shaw's witticism about England and America being "two countries separated by a common language" can be applied to any two dialects of English. Indeed, English more and more resembles Chinese: different Englishes share the same--or roughly the same--written code, but like the dialects of Chinese, diverge so markedly in their phonology as almost to be mutually incomprehensible.
What warrants a claim for the worldliness of English is the language's comprehensivity rather than its comprehensibility. If one measures the rate at which a language is expanding, certainly the vocabulary of English is increasing at a nearly exponential rate. In the eighteenth century, Samuel Johnson's dictionary contained some 43,000 words; in the nineteenth century, Noah Webster's dictionary totaled some 70,000 words; in the twentieth century, the first edition of the Oxford English Dictionary contained over 400,000 entries when completed in 1928; a second edition, in 1989, comprised over 600,000 entries. These dictionaries are restricted to words of generally common use, but no one doubts that, if the terminology from technical fields such as medicine, mathematics, science, and engineering were included, the total would be in the millions. Not only are there more words in the English language than in any other, but the number is augmenting at a faster rate than in any other. As new products are manufactured, new scientific discoveries made, new technical procedures developed, words invented to describe, and refer to, these new phenomena--inasmuch as more of the technological progress continues to be made in English-speaking countries than in non-English-speaking countries--will be in English.
The dominance of English in the world does not derive from the language's transparency, or from the number of those who speak it as a first language (300 million, far less than the more than one billion human beings who speak Chinese as a first language), or from its preeminence as an effective mode of discourse in the business and commerce of the world. The dominance of English certainly does not lie in ease of use, as any student or teacher of English anywhere in the world can testify. It lies very simply in the fact that English is more responsive than any other language to the growing knowledge base that is the hallmark of these postmodern times.
It is this ability to be eclectically open to new thoughts, new ideas, new concepts that has predisposed English to be the major medium of modern communication.4 This predisposition to change and this receptivity to modernization can be illustrated by comparing two languages with contrasting language policies in the last five generations--French and Japanese. France has, famously, resisted changes in the French language, largely through the periodic admonishments of the Académie Française; certainly, populist introductions of le week-end, le car, le bronzing have not been welcomed by French orthodoxy. Japan, on the other hand, has positively welcomed phrases from abroad. Indeed, it devised a system, katakana, to indicate the pronunciation of foreign words. And foreign words that the Japanese have been most assiduous in collecting have been from English. As Bill Bryson says, "The most relentless borrowers of English words have been the Japanese. The number of English words current in Japanese has been estimated to be as high as 200,000" (185). "The proportion of Western words, mostly English, used in Japanese newspapers in 1964," Bryson points out, was "just under ten percent. It would almost certainly be much higher now." The interculturalist would recognize such familiar English words in their Japanese guise: kohi for coffee, biru for beer, erebata for elevator, nekutai for necktie, bata for butter, beikon for bacon, sarada for salad, remon for lemon, chiizu for cheese, bifuteki for beefsteak, hamu for ham, and shyanpu setto for shampoo and set (Bryson 185).
These incursions of English into other languages have elicited different reactions from Japan and France. In Japan, anglicisms are a sign of sophistication and modernity and confer status; in France, they are betrayals of what is essentially French. As early as 1911, the French had a law against the introduction of foreign words; in 1975, they introduced another law, called the Maintenance of the Purity of the French Language, which introduced fines for using illegal anglicismes. François Mitterrand, as late as 1986, declared that France was engaged in a war with Anglo-Saxon (Bryson 185).
I cite these well-known contrasts to put them in conjunction with another contrast and to draw some inferential, possibly sweeping conclusions. If we juxtapose the Japanese and the French attitudes toward changes in the language, particularly toward the introduction of foreign terms and concepts, we can say that the French posture is definitely conservative whereas the Japanese posture has been decidedly liberal. At the base is a difference in the concept of language. Whereas the French view language as a preexistent entity to be preserved, the Japanese see language as an organism in a state of dynamic flux--although they mark native Japanese words by writing them in hiragana.
Whatever the literary ramifications of these contrastive attitudes may be--and I have no wish to compare the literary achievement of modern French writers with that of modern Japanese writers--it is clear that, in the economic, the political, and the technological spheres, France has unarguably become less important as a player on the world stage, and Japan has become--spectacularly--more important, rivaled only by the United States in economic power and technology leadership. One country has preserved its linguistic character and diminished as a cultural influence, whereas the other has sacrificed linguistic purity and, perhaps not so coincidentally, enhanced its economic and technological growth.5
The predominance of English in the world and its incursions into other cultures have obscured the genius of English in absorbing foreign locutions and foreign characteristics. English has, it has often been noted, many phrases that derive from other tongues. Some are recognizable, even in forms slightly mispronounced. So we have such familiar terms as déjà vu, RSVP (for Répondez s'il vous plaît), double entendre, as well as some so deformed by mispronunciation that they may be unrecognizable, such as Loogootee (Indiana) for Le Gautier,6 Buffalo for beau fleuve, Gnaw Bone for Narbonne, coup de gra for coup de grâce, entreprenoor (rhyming with manure) for entrepreneur. I don't see many French people complaining about the incursions of French into the English language, except perhaps to rail against the mispronunciations of French that are rampant in the United States, such as \vur-sails\ for Versailles. Some mispronunciations are so conventionalized--such as \ 
\ for Paris \paree\, \ 
\ for Saint Louis \san looyee\, \ 
\ for D'Etroit--that one scarcely notices their Gallic origins anymore.
The influence is not restricted to vocabulary alone. The plural forms of some verbs retain their Germanic structures, which is why we have brethren, children, and oxen, as well as such plural forms as men, women, feet, geese, and teeth (the irony, as Bryson points out, is that, with such exceptions as hinterland and kindergarten, English has derived perhaps the least from German for its vocabulary). The familiar pronouns they, them, and their have, of course, been borrowed from Scandinavian.
The motleyness of English is part of what I mean when I refer to its worldliness: far from being an impurity that might suggest aesthetic as well as moral imperfection, this discordia concors (to borrow the phrase that Samuel Johnson used to describe the contrastive diction of the Metaphysical poets)--the etymological as well as the structural diversity of English--has been the source of its strength and a reflection of its adaptability. It is not insignificant that the period in which English was most receptive to outside influences, when the language was most flexible, the Elizabethan period, saw its greatest achievements in literature. And it is no accident that the author who borrowed most from other languages, and whose use of English was the most flexible, was and is also its greatest writer: William Shakespeare.
Instead of citing the complete works of Shakespeare to illustrate my point about the vitality of linguistic diversity, let me focus on perhaps the most recited text in English: the Lord's Prayer from The Book of Common Prayer:
Our father, who art in heaven, hallowéd be thy name. Thy kingdom come. Thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven. Give us this day our daily bread. And forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who trespass against us. And lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil, for thine is the kingdom and the power and the glory, for ever and ever.
In this passage, the rhythm and the cadences are uncanny, but the pleasure that the ear derives from these sonorous phrases derives from a mixture of Anglo-Saxon and Latinate words, with a smattering of Scandinavian diction thrown in ("father," "thy," "those," "thine"). One of the most remarkable things about this passage is that the word the, one of the most frequently encountered words in the English language, does not occur until the end, and then it occurs three times: "for thine is the kingdom and the power and the glory." So much is obvious and can be discerned without too much historical background.
But scholarship earlier in this century uncovered so-called cursus forms in Latin prosody, phrases and clauses that fit certain rhythmic patterns, which were codified and precisely labeled (Croll). The parsing of these phrases always began with an accented syllable and in Latin always ended with an unaccented syllable. The first accented syllable had to be followed by at least two unaccented syllables, as in / - - or / - - -. The conclusion of the cursus form could be either a simple succession of accented syllables followed by an unaccented syllable, as in / -, in which case it was called a planus, yielding the parsing / - - / -. If it ended with a retroflex, syncopated rhythm, created by a sequence of syllables that were accented-unaccented-accented-unaccented, as in / - / -, the cursus was labeled velox, yielding the pattern / - - / - / -. And if it was a repetition of two declining sequences of one accented syllable followed by two unaccented syllables, it was called a tardus, yielding the pattern / - - - / - - / - - .
Returning to the Lord's Prayer, one will see that the Latin prosody has been strictly observed and that there are examples of a variety of classical cursus forms--altogether, six instances of the planus cursus form, one of the velox, and one of the tardus:
planus "eárth as it is in héaven": / - - - - / - "nót into temptátion": / - - - / - "delíver us from évil": - / - - - / - "thine is the kíngdom": / - - / - "pówer and the glóry": / - - - / - "éver and éver": / - - / - tardus "forgíve us our tréspasses": - / - - / - - velox "Our fáther, who árt in héaven": - / - - / - / -
This analysis would only prove that the Lord's Prayer in English is merely a faithful exemplification of classical prosody. But we musn't overlook the strongly stressed spondees and amphibrachs occasioned by the monosyllabic Anglo-Saxon words. For interspersed in the Lord's Prayer are the Anglo-Saxon cursus forms--labeled by scholars as "native"--that always end on an accented syllable, as in:
"hállowéd be Thy Náme": / / - - / / /
"Thy kíngdom cóme": / / - /
"Thye wíll bé dóne": / / / /
"Gíve ús thís dáy oúr dáily bréad": / / / / / / - /
The Lord's Prayer can be presented as a prosodic patchwork quilt, thus (native cursus forms are printed in boldface):
Our father, who art in heaven, hállowéd be thy name. Thy kingdom come. Thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven. Give us this day our daily bread, and forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who trespass against us. And lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil, for thine is the kingdom and the power and the glory, for ever and ever. Amen.
The perdurability of this passage does not depend on the faith of the speaker: even atheists can appreciate the beauty of this passage. But the prosodic beauty of the text is essentially mongrel, a mixture of Latinate and "native" Anglo-Saxon forms. This example illustrates the irony that, despite the logic of such conservative guardians of language as the Académie Française, that language is preserved not by warding off the introduction of foreign elements but by incorporating them.
That irony brings me to the strangest and most ironic of concepts, the so-called lingua franca. The phrase, in current usage, designates a specific language or sublanguage of widespread if not universal use, something, as Webster's remarks, "resembling a common language." The etymology of the phrase, however, indicates not a pure language: in the seventeenth century it referred to a "mixed language or jargon used in the Levant, consisting largely of Italian words deprived of their inflexions." Later it was extrapolated to refer to "any mixed jargon formed as a medium of intercourse between people speaking different languages" (OED). By the nineteenth century, lingua franca referred to almost any mixture of languages, whether "half Italian and half Portuguese" or "that undefined mixture of Italian, French, Greek, and Spanish, which is spoken throughout the Mediterranean" (OED).7 The upshot of this etymological excursion is to remind us that linguae francae are linguistic hodgepodges, not verbal quintessences. It is no wonder that this term, which is now part of the English language, happens to be a Latin phrase that refers to French yet designates a mixed language of widespread currency--itself an example of mongrelness or worldliness.
I want now to reverse our concerns, from seeing the world in English to seeing English in the world. English is undoubtedly the most widely taught language in the world. Foreign learners of English outnumber by several factors native learners of the language. Indeed, the English language may be the prime technology that speakers of English have to offer the world. It is generally recognized that English is one of the most difficult languages to learn, a fact that, however true, is hardly a pedagogical blessing: we can cite the intricacies of English grammar, the arbitrariness of English idiom, the waywardness of English spelling--all these characteristics are certainly daunting for the learner (to say nothing of the English teacher). For the learner, what might be more helpful would be to point out what is easy about English: its word order, its lack of tonal inflection. The list is admittedly small, but one must grasp at straws when that's all that's available. What are needed are more entrées into English that will make it less formidable for the new learner. What I want to explore in the rest of this paper are some of the possible entrées.
We need to reduce the sense of the foreignness of English for non-English-speaking students. Elsewhere, I have written about the main deficiency of most foreign language efforts, which often result more in teaching that the language is foreign than in teaching the language itself ("Taking"). Yet, one version of this strategy, which stands at the opposite end from the excessive "foreignizing" that most language teachers are guilty of, seems to me somewhat misguided. I refer to the strategy of emphasizing cognates in the language being acquired in order to reinforce familiarity with that language. This approach suffers from two essential miscalculations. The first flaw is that it is culturally biased, and to the extent that it works (if it works), it works better when the language of the student and the language being acquired are cognate. It works better, for example, if a Spanish-speaking student is trying to acquire French, but it is totally irrelevant when, say, a Chinese student is trying to learn English. The second flaw is that the concept that a foreign language is merely one's native language in disguise fails to alert students to false similarities between lexically identical items, what the French aptly call faux amis: the English word ignore, for example, is not an exact equivalent of the French ignore; nor is the German word Lust the equivalent of the English word lust. I do not know the technical term for these faux amis, but I think of them as allographs, that is, words that are spelled exactly the same in two languages but that mean something different altogether.8 I offer an example from a menu proposed by a Hong Kong hotel, most of which was in English. One item, however, was actually French, but it was, crucially, not printed in italic type, thereby failing to indicate typographically that the item was in a language other than English. The item was "pain surprise." This certainly did not seem very appetizing--hardly an enhancement of what was being offered on the rest of the menu. After a moment's pause, one realized that there was a printer's error and that, if the phrase had been printed in italic type, "pain surprise" would have been understood easily as pain surprise, a special bread of the chef's devising. "Pain surprise" / pain surprise constitutes what I call an allographic pair, an instance where a French person might read the phrase as indicating a special kind of bread rather than a shocking ache, and an American might think the reverse.9
In language teaching, it does not do to emphasize the latent familiarity of the unfamiliar or to belabor the unfamiliarity of the foreign. The object of learning the foreign language is not merely to recognize only the similarities between languages or to bristle at the inchoate differences. This strategy merely reinforces the innate inertia of learners, their reluctance to depart from familiar linguistic terrain. Learning a foreign language is creating one's own idiolect in another language. To put it in deconstructionist terms, learning a foreign language is not erasing the self to become the other, nor is it pretending to be the other, or the opposite of the self, by some form of mimicry or imitation--neither strategy is psychologically or psycholinguistically possible. The object of learning another language is to extend the self in terms of the other, to develop a version of one's self in another linguistic and cultural milieu. Ivan Poldauf is right: "The mother tongue is at the same time the learner's greatest friend and his greatest enemy" (4).
How does one develop a sense of oneself in another linguistic milieu? I should like to borrow from Jacques Lacan's notion of mirror-image recognition, which marks the onset of a sense of selfhood. In Lacan's notion, the mirror provides the onanistic and solipsistic child with a means of seeing the self as the other. After that watershed event, the self can develop a perspective that includes objectivity as well as irony, that can see the self not only in the first person but also as the second and the third person. The maturity that develops with this mirror-image transition is, in a way, an extension of the self, or, to put it more accurately, the recognition that the self is no longer singular (in both grammatical and ontological senses of the word) but plural and pluralistic, heterogenous and schizophrenic.10
I should like to propose a similar tactic for introductory language learning. It requires understanding a phenomenon marginalized in the literature of language learning and neglected in the study of onomastics, something that I call xenonyms. Xenonyms are simply what the other calls the self, or the words foreigners use to designate the native. It is a way of establishing an identity in another language.11 German, for example, is the English xenonym for the people who refer to themselves as Deutsch; chinois is the French xenonym for the people who refer to themselves as Hanren or Tangren. Meiguoren is the Chinese xenonym for the people who call themselves Americans. Secondary xenonyms include the foreign designations of native places. Peking, for example, is a designation that no Chinese native who is ignorant of English will recognize as the capital of China. For natives of the city, Peking bears no phonetic resemblance to the name of their home city, Beijing.12
Xenomyms can also become phonetic xenographs, that is, two words that are written the same way, designate the same place, and even mean the same thing but that are pronounced in different ways, such as "Shanghai" in English, French, and Mandarin, variously pronounced "Shanghai" \
\, "Shanghai" \ 
\, "Shanghai" \ 
\, and "Shanghai" \ 
\. 13
We now return to our earlier question: How do we avoid the extremes--both impossible psycholinguistically yet both implicit in popular learning strategies--of replicating the other by imitation or of transforming the self through solipsism? There is a middle way. One must find a means of understanding the other without denying one's own identity and, at the same time, of projecting the self without solipsism--of, in other words, nativizing the foreign. In this process, one must distinguish between creating self-conscious language learners and language learners who are self-aware. The difference is that the result of one is a heightened interest that results from developing a heuristic pragmatics of learning, whereas the result of the other is psychological paralysis, an inability or an unwillingness to perform in any milieu other than one's own.
Xenonyms may be an effective way of relating the beginning learner to the new linguistic milieu: it is a way of situating the self in a phonetically different environment.14 The difficulty of semantic reference is nonexistent, because the learner is already cognizant of the signified--indeed, the student is certainly more familiar with the signified than most natives in the foreign language: the task is to learn a new signifier of an old signified. There is, in this process, one natural and instinctive error that must be overcome. That is the assumption by the native learner that the xenonym is an inaccurate or less accurate phonological referent, that, for example, "Shanghai" is a misappropriation of Shanghai \ \ and that "Pekin" is a garbled version of Beijing. In order to adopt the perspective of the other, native Chinese learners must learn to hear their native places in the accents of the foreigner: they must speak Chinese and not zhongwen or guoyu or putonghua. One must overcome the notion that China is a corruption of zhongguo, that Peking is a mispronunciation of the Cantonese for the national capital (Buck-ging). These are authentic words in English, just as Pekin is an authentic word in French.
If one has any doubt about the phenomenological soundness of this analysis, one need only take a taxicab in Hong Kong and ask for the famous Landmark Building. To the non-English-speaking taxi driver, the more clearly and the more exactly one pronounces landmark, with full emphasis on the d and the k, the less chance one has of getting to one's destination. But if one pronounces landmark sloppily or, more accurately, if one pronounces it precisely in Cantonese, as \lanma\, one will be transported with due dispatch. Speakers of English must think "Lanma" in Cantonese if they want to reach their intended destination. There is no point in remonstrating with the Cantonese driver about his mispronunciation. For in his linguistic milieu, lanma is a building he recognizes; landmark is both linguistically and phenomenologically unknown to him.15
Part of the difficulty of learning a new language is the strangeness of different modes of phonological behavior.16 Conceptually, however, the rules and conventions of new languages are not hard. Retaining them in colloquial and idiomatic use is another matter. Rote memory may be helpful, but it doesn't aid in the production of improvised language, which is what constitutes oral and written proficiency. The greatest psychological difficulty in encountering another language is the reluctance of most selves to become other selves, to put their identity at risk by adopting or developing another identity. Implicit in this is a certain subliminal sense of inauthenticity or unadmitted pretense, as if one were masquerading illicitly as someone else. Most students experience some discomfort when they fail to master a language, and it's not only from frustration at their own incompetence. The temperamentally earnest student will also experience a certain discomfort in negotiating a persona that is not endemic, not psychologically authentic. That's why students with the instincts of actors, to say nothing of actors themselves, make the most successful language learners. They have no qualms about pretending to be someone else; they experience no sense of deceit in pretending to be a native in another linguistic medium. In fact, with actors, the more successful the deception, the more effective the performance, the greater the gratification.
It is this ability to generate multiple selves that, in my view, is at the heart of a psychologically effective approach to language learning. Unfortunately, most monolingual speakers have anchored their identity in one language, and the strength of that identity impedes their ability to learn a new language. Multilingual learners, on the other hand, have little difficulty acquiring yet another language. But the reason is not that they have mastered the secret of learning languages or that they have a mental predisposition for new tongues. These explanations merely beg the question. What enhances the language acquisition of multilingual learners is that, once they have acquired additional selves with each language learned, the acquisition of another language becomes merely the enrichment of identity by the addition of another linguistic persona, somewhat like an opera singer adding roles to his or her repertoire. For the multilingual learner, a new language is not so much an obstacle to be overcome as an opportunity to be explored. There is no threat to one's identity, because one's identity is not coterminous with any one language. The self is not construed as being coterminous with a single linguistic setting. The multilingual learner is much like the traveler who separates the notion of self from the environment in which the self is situated; he or she is like the actor who sees a different linguistic milieu as merely another stage on which to perform. This forgetting of the self in the acquisition of another self involves no enforced psychic amnesia, nor does it prevent the learner from being self-constructively critical in much the same way that a successful actor can be critical of his or her performance. Just as different roles demand a great versatility from an actor, language learning requires flexibility in one's conception of self.17 One can be self-critical without being self-conscious, and self-aware without being self-absorbed. If, as Shakespeare said, "all the world's a stage," then there are many stages in the world, and the worldliness of English provides a glimpse of more stages than any other language. Or, to put it another way, if the stage is English, the language learner will find more of the world there than on any other stage.
Ronald Carter writes that "[a]wareness within the socio-cultural meaning is also best achieved by invoking the contrastive principle," a principle that includes "activities which generate awareness of language cross-culturally" (11). Certainly, attention to allographs and xenonyms would stimulate an awareness of language cross-culturally. It would also have the secondary, but not negligible, benefit of introducing the student to a different phonetic palette in the new (not foreign) language. And a focus on xenonyms would not only stimulate an abstract interest in the different phonological characteristics of another language but also prompt students to secure concrete command over their linguistic identity in the new language.
Carter is heartened by approaches to language training that "promote a greater awareness on the part of learners of the learning strategies which they use." He goes on to say, "Such greater consciousness will, it is argued, help make such learners more reflective, flexible, and adaptable. A more reflective language learner is a more effective language learner" (11). I would merely add that a more self-reflective language learner is an even more effective language learner.
The author is Professor of Comparative Literature and East Asian Language and Cultures at Indiana University, Bloomington, and Professor and Chair of English at Lingnan College, Hong Kong. He is also the founder of the East Asian Summer Language Institute at Indiana University. This article is based on his presentation at the 1998 MLA convention in San Francisco, California.
1While there are some who still cling to notions of universal grammar (see Pinker 238), most linguists would shy away from grandiose universalist claims. "We have no 'global language,'" M. K. Halliday writes, "only several 'international languages' such as English" (27).
2"At a guess," Peter Strevens writes, "perhaps 1 billion of the 1.5 billion NNS English users have learned or picked up the English they use in the past twenty years" (29).
3A native speaker of English teaching in Hong Kong, for instance, may find the local accent so bizarre (but consistent) that when his or her students pronounce a word incorrectly, he or she may be the only one who is unable to comprehend it. So much for defining language as the discourse of a community!
4Strevens puts it this way: "Ever since its earliest beginnings it has been part of the nature of the English language to incorporate ideas, concepts, and expressions from other societies and to make them part of English" (31).
5Strevens has the same intimation when he writes, "It is an interesting speculation whether the contrasting attitudes have contributed to the different history of English and of French in this respect in the past fifty years" (31-32).
6I owe this etymology to Paul Bouissac.
7This discussion, as well as a consideration of "the 'purity' of language," is excerpted from my English as the World's Language.
8Allographs are a special instance of Bernard Py's notion of "exolinguistic conversation"--"the confrontation of two interpretations of the same utterances" (180)--but they are restricted to written forms, whereas Py is focusing on oral forms.
9A Thai friend tells me the story of a compatriot whose given name was Man. On a visit to the United States, he was astonished to be addressed by a total stranger, a black person, who said, "Hey, Man. How're ya doin'?" To which the Thai's response was, "How did you know my name?"
10Terence Odlin writes: "Personality factors may also account for the varying degrees of success that individuals have in approximating pronunciation patterns in the target language" (130). He cites Alexander Guiora's hypothesis that "individual differences in the ability to approximate nativelike pronunciation should reflect individual differences in the flexibility of psychic processes, or more specifically, in the empathetic capacity" (145).
11"Curran and followers of Community Language Learning (CLL) also recognize the student's loss of identity when operating in the foreign language" (Anderson 109).
12These exercises might constitute what Eric Hawkins calls "education of the ear" (36). Whatever the pedagogical shortcomings of Li Yang, the most famous English teacher in China, he is correct when he says, "Learning English is a physical process for Chinese people. Our tongues can make the sounds used in Chinese, but not English. We must train our tongue muscles to become international" (12).
13Of course, the Mandarin pronunciation of Shanghai can be considered a xenonym as well to the natives of Shanghai, whose pronunciation of their hometown is "Szonghei" \ 
\.
14It's part of the program that Eric Hawkins recommends for building up the student's "confidence in disembedding new phonological patterns" (36).
15Or, as Gillian Kay puts it, "When elements of a foreign culture and language are 'borrowed' into the culture and language of another, they become adapted to their new cultural and linguistic context" (68).
16Gillian Kay writes: "Speakers of one language often have difficulty reproducing the sounds of another language which do not exist in their own. The borrowing of lexical items containing such sounds usually entails adaptation of their pronunciation" (69).
17Martha Pennington writes: "it is reasonable to hypothesize better results in language education based on a contextualized, associational approach to teaching pronunciation" (34).
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