ENGLISH TODAY AND TOMORROW - VARIETIES OF ENGLISH Essays - Culture

ENGLISH TODAY AND TOMORROW - VARIETIES OF ENGLISH Once a vast Empire, The United Kingdom has had a huge cultu ral, sociological and economic impact on its former colonies or members of community we call the Commonwealth. We are going to touch upon one of the main consequences of the colonial era - the English language. In many places where the British (English) had an influence, English still today functions as the official, often native language, of course with some amendments made to fit the locals. Additionally, someplace else, English is further used as the lingua franca , where this term is also known as the common or vehicular language used to make communication possible between people who do not share a nativ e language. We can see this for instance in Nigeria, where different places and tribes use their own means of communication and speak English to understand each other. The next role of the English language is that it functions as an international language . With the United States of America 's leading role in the world's economy and the United Kingdom following slightly behind, international companies and trade dealers use English as their means of communication together with French and sometimes Spanish. Why? The English language is one of the easier ones to learn as a foreigner without keeping you up all night. As for the present-day geographical distribution of English, it is spoken now on all the continents without exception and it is the third mostly spoken language in the world with only Chinese () and Spanish () being the first two. As I mentioned earlier, this distribution goes back to the colonial times and nowadays we can distinguish four geographical groups as follows: First being the group in British Isles including England, Wales, Ireland and Scotland. The second group functions in America, consisting of the United States, Canada and The Caribbean. Third English language group is in Africa and West, East and South parts of Africa are its subsets. Last group is spoken in the Pacific and is divided into South Asia, Australia and New Zealand and the Pacific Islands. With that being said, we can consider Britain and America the two main distinct groups for the English language. For each there is a set standard of formal language: In Britain, this is called the Receiv ed Pronunciation and in America we talk about General American . Received Pronunciation is the accent of Standard English in the United Kingdom and is defined as "the standard accent of English as spoken in the south of England , although it can be heard from native speakers throughout England and Wales. The study of RP is concerned exclusively with pronunciation, whereas Standard English , the Queen's English , Oxford English , and BBC English are also concerned with matters such as grammar, vocabulary and style. An individual using RP will typically speak Standard English , although the converse or inverse is not necessarily true. The standard language may be pronounced with a regional accent and the contrapositive is usually correct. It is very unlikely that someone speaking RP would use it to speak a regional dialect. General American differs from the RP in the fact that it is widely used by m ajority of Americans, when, on the other hand, RP is only used by the small minority. This general separation to groups is a one type, the other, also very important distinction in the English language, is the division between an accent and a dialect. And since in Britain there is a very visible social stratification, where people are often able to make instant and unconscious judgements about a stranger's class affiliation on the basis of his or her accent, it is important. We have to differentiate between words people use (= dialect) and the sounds they make, their pronunciation. Accent, or pronunciation, is a special element of a dialect that needs separate attention to be properly understood. A famous distinction in pronunciation in England is the so-called BATH vowel', the quality of the a' sound differing between north and south. For example, someone from Leeds, in the north of England, would typically pronounce bath' with the short a' of

Future Updates

Future Updates Future Updates We created this blog so that many of you could get an on-the-ground view of how development of is going. Over the summer, we listened to your feedback and kept track of all the bugs/feature requests that were reported. Last month, we got the go ahead from our Information Systems(IS) Professors/Advisors to continue developing for Fall 2007. We were astounded by the number of users that began using , and by the sheer amount of feedback we received from the community; 117 requests to be exact! Many of you mentioned that you would like the ability to edit bibliographies. This is a feature we’ve been meaning to add since day 1, so look for that to be implemented in the next few weeks. Also, look for Harvard Citation support to be implemented within a month. Alot of you have been asking for the ability to share and tag your bibliographies. In the next month, we’ll be working on the User Interface(UI) and putting in the functionality for that. Even more of you have been asking for database support, and to expand our selection of books, magazines, films, academic journals, and our â€Å"other sources†. Rest assured we are working towards these things in the next 3 months. Some of you have wondered why we haven’t considered a lot of proprietary databases; JSTOR, IMDB, etc. We’d love to support many of these items, but they would incur ridonculous licensing fees that we are unable to absorb in our current state. As always, we depend on you to let us know if you run into any bugs, or if you think a certain feature would be a great addition to . Please feel free to contact us. Cheers! Alvin Fong

Historians question whether or not social movements such as the civial Essay

Historians question whether or not social movements such as the civial rights and womens rights movements were successful in add - Essay Example The society today paints a picture of a highly prosperous country boasting of a cohesive social structure, one that integrates everyone despite their differences. The American society as it is today is the creation of a number of social movements such as civil rights and women rights group. Such groups of people worked hard to change a number of mindsets that could have otherwise led to either the collapse of the country or the emergence of one of the world’s worst human crisis in the history of humanity (Carl 98). With hard work and sound leadership, the country listened to the plights of the civil rights groups and addressed their issues. These led to serious changes in the American constitution through time and today America owes what it is to the sacrifices of some of the pressure group members who believed in the achievement of an all-inclusive society (Jonathan 71). Europeans took Africans into the United States to work in their plantations. However, soon after the slave ry period, the world became industrialized and for once people never needed many laborers to work in the field. This therefore led to the formation of regional and politics of segregations. The whites never considered the Africans as their equals. The whites discriminated against the African community and made sure they felt unwelcome. The society was segregated, and the Africans not allowed mingling freely with the rest of the population. They therefore never went to school and had no employment; they thus lived in abject poverty. The worst level of this discrimination was on politics and governance, the number of Africans in the country was nearing the number of the whites. Despite this large population, the rest of the Americans denied the African American community a chance to elect their leaders. They never took part in an electoral process and were not allowed to run for any electoral position. For a long time in the history of America, the African American community alongside other marginalized communities lived in abject poverty and in a humiliating environment. By the begining of the nineteenth century, a number of pressure groups sprung up to fight for the rights of the marginalized and the African American community. Led by radical and selfless African American leaders such as Martin Luther King Junior, this creed of Americans believed in equality before the law. They thus called for understanding and peaceful coexistence. They called for the abolishment of the racial segregation that was threatening to tear the country down into two. These struggles would get violent at times and the government would order for the attack on such groups and senseless murder. This drew the attention of the international community. There later followed a number of global human rights watch bodies calling for the restructuring of the American society (Jonathan 55). The African Americans were therefore allowed to vote and be voted into any elective force should they fee l like. Today, the country boasts an African American president. For a long time, this remained a dream that could not even be conceptualized at the time by the pressure groups (Johnson 66). The historical America did not only include a highly segregated population but also contained a male chauvinistic one. The men considered themselves the head of their families and therefore