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Non-native Attitudes to Non-native Englishes : Implications for English as an International Form of Communication

English can only be an efficient medium for spoken communication if its speakers are comfortably intelligible to both native and non-native speakers with widely diverging language backgrounds. This should be reflected in the pronunciation norms for any internationally viable variety of English. The importance of intelligibility is, of course, also recognized by those who see international English fundamentally as a medium for communication between non-natives, and, like Jenkins (2006), exclude native-speaker considerations. This does, however, beg the question of how to define intelligibility in terms of the widely variant standards of non-native speech without any recourse to native-speaker English. Be that as it may, many non-native speakers will wish to retain access to a type of English that can be used easily with non-native and native speakers alike. A recent study (Van den Doel 2006), based on an Internet survey of well over 500 native-speaker respondents from all over the English-speaking world, shows that Jenkins’ recommendations may cause non-native speech to be affected by serious issues of intelligibility and acceptability. While intelligibility is obviously of prime significance for native speakers, they also regard acceptability as a major concern. The study also indicated that pronunciation features in nonnative speech are likely to be notably downgraded when they are also stigmatised in local native Englishes. This may be taken to indicate that a truly international English pronunciation model requires that the attitudes and needs of native speakers be taken into account.