The increasing prominence of English as a lingua franca can be understood from the fact
that it has been a mandatory course, in one form or the other, for credit points in school
curriculums all over the world. Despite the emergence of English as a common interface
of communication, in fostering peace, in the cross-cultural and continental context, the
question of the so-called ‘Standard English’, which is frequently being identified with
‘Native English’, perpetually haunts English-language learners, sometimes stigmatizing
the learners and speakers in other parts of the world, leading to counters to the superiority
of a certain dialectal form of English. On the other hand, the concept of ‘Standard English’
that refers chiefly to written form and that of ‘Native English’ that refers usually to the
spoken form are being looked at as personal feelings or prejudices as there were no
universal norms. The ‘native English’ and ‘native fluency’ are generally used to refer to
phonological part of a dialect of an individual, with a complete disregard to individual’s
knowledge of grammar, syntax, vocabulary and the ability to generate creative expressions.
In spite of the standard dialectal form or native dialectal form dilemma, academic
communities are progressing with certain achievement of ‘proficiency in English’, and
the global citizens are walking out of universities to hold the key positions awaiting them
in different fields. Unrestrained by an ‘accent’, many people, whose mother tongue is not
English, proved their acumen and productivity, and maintained the hegemony of genius,
even in the countries where English is first language. The questions of ‘native’ and ‘nonnative’
or ‘standard and non-standard’ English forms arise mostly in the contexts of
employing English language teachers from the countries where English is either a second
language or a foreign language, even though they are highly proficient and authoritative in
English language and literature. This kind of ‘linguistic white worship’ (Yeung, 2006, as
quoted by George Braine, 2010, p. 19) is clearly evident in the recruitments by some
universities from the Asian and the Middle East countries like Japan and Saudi Arabia,
apart from the frequent manifestations in the job postings by some of the universities in
English-speaking countries. On the contrary, in all other fields, viz., computers, engineering,
medicine, etc., the employers look for the knowledge and the competence of the prospective
recruits with the ‘required’ proficiency of English.
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