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Asia-Pacific Journalists Meeting 2000
Mr. Yoshio Hatano (President, Foreign Press Center/Japan)
The topic of English is not only an important topic in Japan but a common topic of interest in the entire East Asia. So we can look forward to animated, interesting discussion this morning as well as this afternoon.
Chairperson (Yuko Aotani, Japan)
It's estimated that about 1.5 billion people on Earth speak English now, with more and more people from non-native countries speaking English. So it seems the time is right to address the issue of how English is used in the global environment and to find out whether English will dominate as the lingua franca in the next century, if not already now. During the morning session we will be discussing whether English will be the prevailing language in the information technologies sector and what the future holds for the English language.
First of all, we would like to hear Ms. Chan as our keynote speaker. Ms. Chan, please.
1st Session
Chan Yuen Ying (China)
As the world goes digital at breakneck speed and as cultures, economies, and governments are e-transforming themselves and launching themselves into the digital age, can Asians keep up? More than 40% of Americans are Internet users. The figure for Asians is just 1.6%.
Today an estimated 87% of documents on the Internet are in English, yet for millions among us English is not their primary language. If we don't understand English, we will be left out of the benefits the Internet offers. Is English a recipe for growth?
While North America still has the largest number of Net users, the major growth of the Internet is now in non-English speaking areas, particularly Asia. By the year 2003 it is estimated that non-English speakers on the Net will grow to 415 million, while native English speakers will number 225 million.
The Web is also growing multilingual. Multinationals are localizing their contents, including their websites. Languages growing fastest on the Web include Spanish, Portuguese, German, Japanese, Chinese, and Scandinavian languages.
Technology is also helping to close the digital divide between Asia and North America. Researchers and software developers have been working hard to overcome the language limitations of consumer software. Onscreen help also now makes new software more easily and rapidly customized for last used languages. And companies are making local software to meet the market. For instance, software for e-commerce, for e-procurement, e-marketplace. Technology is also making it easier for non-English speakers to access the Web. Voice recognition systems are finally emerging that can recognize more than 90% of the words spoken by their users.
In terms of technology, Asians are leapfrogging North America in building ramps to the information superhighway. We are building routes that bypass the PC altogether. Consider accessing the Web through inexpensive, round-the-clock facilities like their mobile phone. We are developing in Japan and China technologies that multiply wireless transmission speed by 40 times what is possible now.
International Internet experts, technology investors actually, are watching Japan very closely, because the technology under development in your country could play a key role in the next phase of the Net's evolution in the United States and Europe. And we have an advantage in Japan and in China, because the mobile phone is heavily used here. With the growth in Asian usage, the content of Internet will also increasingly reflect Asia. The technology revolution is particularly strong in China, with 90% of apartments, for instance, in Shanghai being connected with fiber optics. Similarly, the number of mobile phone users in China will surpass the number in Japan and in a few months in the United States.
I have given you many reasons that Asians will get online even if people will not speak English. But that doesn't mean that we don't need English and to have our society brought up to speed quickly in the knowledge of English. In spite of the revolutionary changes on the Web, the main language of the Internet is likely to be English. Between 600 and 700 million people speak English in addition to their own languages. That is more than the total number of native English speakers. As the Internet grows, other languages on the Web will grow, but the use of English will also grow. Like IT [information technology], English is also a tool. To answer the question of today's meeting, "Only English, Please," I submit that our answer should be "English? Yes. Only English? No." Is English a recipe for Asia's growth in the twenty-first century? I think English most definitely is one of the ingredients for growth, but not the entire recipe. English is an indispensable tool if Asians want to make ourselves heard in the global media. If we want to be a global partner in e-commerce on a global scale, English is one of the ramps for us to get on the information superhighway and to navigate the brave new world of cyberspace.
But in addition to IT and English, Asians have to do more to take ourselves and our own economy into the next century. We need to open up our political system, promoting openness and democracy, which is a challenge we face in China and in Hong Kong. We must provide increased access by citizens of diverse sources of information. We must also provide unrestricted and equitable access to networks for providers and consumers of services and content. We must have sound government policy and commercial practices that promote these ends. Our children will need skills that promote innovation and communication. To accomplish all these, we will need vision, determination, and leadership.
The Irish poet Yeats said, "English belongs to us, but we don't belong to English." In this day and age of globalization, we can also say that "English belongs to the world, the world does not belong to English." With this in mind, we should be confident in our own culture and tradition. We should be able to move forward to embrace English objectively, a world language, without having to compromise our own tradition and culture. And by doing so, we will be enriching the English language and contributing to a global culture that is only beginning to take shape.
Kwan Weng Kin (Singapore)
Many countries in the region are at present concerned that their lack of competence in English could put them back in the information technology race. In this respect, Singapore can be said to have a head start. We have been most fortunate in that English has long been the language of administration and the main language of instruction in local schools and universities. But we have our own share of problems. Despite our long association with English, many people in Singapore today are unable to speak standard English even though they have little trouble reading and writing.
Last year the Singapore government began to take a serious look at the state of English in our country. As the government sees it, the use of standard English is an important way of attaining the new goal it has set. That goal namely is that Singapore should become a first world economy that can compete with the best in the world in hi-tech industries and other sophisticated services. We see English as the language of commerce, of science and technology, the language that will enable Singaporeans to reach out to the rest of the world. We see English not only as the language of the developed countries, such as the United States, Britain, or Canada, but as a language that is widely used in other developed countries in the non-English speaking world, such as Germany, Sweden, and Switzerland. Standard English, so the government says, is necessary for us to communicate and to do business directly with millions of people around the world. But instead of standard English, unfortunately many Singaporeans today speak what we have come to call "Singlish." Singlish, the government insists, is a kind of bastardized English that English speakers outside of Singapore, and not only just native speakers, cannot really understand.
In a speech last year, the prime minister, Mr. Goh Chok Tong, said- he put it this way-"Poor English," he says, "reflects badly on us. It makes us seem less intelligent."
What steps did the government take? In April this year they launched a "Speak Good English" movement to actively discourage the use of Singlish and to get people to start speaking better English, a target for people under the age of 40 including students at all levels. There were also moves to improve the standards of English teaching in schools. For example, to get children started earlier on phonetics and so on. The government reckons that it will take 15 to 20 years, one generation, to improve the level of English in Singapore.
Kwon Chae Hyun (ROK)
I think to tell people to intensify the importance of English. And many Korean people believe that, so I introduce some education problems of Korea right now.
Especially after 1995, President Kim Yong-sam intensified the importance of English, and after that we are intensifying the education system of English. But there are still many problems.
In terms of English communication competence, it is generally accepted to be exposed to English speaking environment more than 4,000 hours. We have more than 22,000 middle and high school teachers and almost 10,000 elementary school English teachers, but only 15% of them said that they could teach in English. To make things worse, there are few English education colleges where lectures are made in English. This is a core problem, so we have had a debate of English as official language three years ago. And we have not yet got the conclusion, but we approach and another realistic method.
Kavi Chongkittavorn (Thailand)
There are various ways, as a matter of fact,the English that we are talking is Englishes. The most important I have to talk from the historical point of view. The Thai use English to fight colonialism. We escaped colonialization. We have to articulate English when the British Empire stretching its arms to knock Thai doors. We use English to ward off foreign colonizers, so for us English has been used as a tool for natural survival. So there is no question that English is so important in Thai society and that has been our policy to use English. But somehow we fail to internalize the English and the IT revolution that Yuen Ying talked about came in later. It has highlighted the importance of English in the age of globalization. So for the case of Thailand has been there, is an empowerment tool for the elite at the time, for the leader to fight against colonialization.
Now, moving to the twenty-first century, because of the importance of English, the Thai were caught in a dilemma because our education system on an average children spends 10 years studying English. And the knowledge of English is still, what do you call, in ex communicado, they cannot speak very well. But you must not be surprised because in Thailand a lot of Thai know very little English. For example, they know less than 1,000 words. They speak as if they know 10,000 words. In Japan, you know 10,000 words, you speak as if you know three words. So, it's the ability to express. So of late in Thailand, we have a lot of competition for English speaking. I will use myself for instance. I just told my colleagues that I've been writing English for the past 18 years and I know only 1,500, but I write as if I know the whole encyclopedia of the English language, which is the case.
And I think this has to do also with the mindset. The Thai are not afraid of English. This is why Thai government has declared five years ago that bilingual schools could be established to encourage Thai children to study English at a young age. If you start studying English at a much later age-maybe nine or ten-it's a little bit too late. And as you can see in the beginning, And one thing that surprised me here is the form of learning English is like a ritual. If you want to speak English, it's a ritual here in Japan. But in Thailand speaking English, you just speak anything you want as long as you can communicate.
So with the new education policy, we have a problem here, because some Thai families have sent their children to international schools, like myself. I send my son to an international school. Just three months ago, I dragged my son out of Thai school. And now I have a new problem, because my son is speaking English and he does not speak or does not want to study Thai language. So you have to address the balance here. So I think this is the dilemma that a country like Thailand has to deal with. You have dominant English language, which the government is encouraging, so I think a lot of parents are quite worried because you don't have a good policy to teach the young Thai the Thai language, because it's very boring to study the language. It's not as wide or children books as in English. And for us, the English education is something very new, and that explains why for the first time we have a large number of English teachers now imported to Thailand, and we also have a large number of foreign universities that set up branches in Bangkok. In the case of Thailand, we have branches actually from all over the world. From Australia, from England, from America, and in Thailand we don't distinguish English.
And in fact, I think it's important to make some distinction here. We use English as the way to empower ourselves as a tool of communication. So we don't care so much about the form. We want to convey the substance.
And finally, because of the proliferation of English as the global English, a country like Thailand has to prepare itself, and this is why we encourage the use of the Internet, access to information law. Thailand, like Japan, we are the two Asian countries that have access to information. You can get government information, and it's also important that in Thailand the English language is one of the tools to communicate with the outside world. I told you that since 1850 we use English. Now we use English to express ourselves. Sometimes people ask why the Thai have been so successful in expressing itself on the world stage because we know that whatever we did inside our country is okay as long as you can present the word in English. For example, in English the word "Smiling Thailand," you know, and "Friendly Thailand," "Amazing Thailand." And I think we've been quite successful, but it has certainly blurred the picture of English education in Thailand.
Tolbert Kathryn (USA)
I think that English is not so necessary to take advantage of the Internet. An analyst in Tokyo gave me these figures the other day. He said that 10 years ago in Japan 90% of the Internet traffic was to the United States, 10% was domestic within Japan. Today it's the reverse, that 90% of the Internet traffic in Japan is domestic and only 10% is to the United States. Part of that is because 10 years ago those using the Internet in Japan were tech people interested in being in touch with those people in the United States creating Web pages and such, and now the Internet users in Japan include mostly the general public. But I am surprised at the extent of the speed at which the Internet is adapting itself to other languages. I read that the Windows Millennium is available in 28 languages. It has a spell checker in four varieties of English. And as Ms. Chan pointed out, the number of non-English users of the Internet is the faster growing group. And there are all sorts of other things pointing to the ability of people to use the Internet without fluency in English. The voice recognition software, for example. And although programming languages are based on English terms with simplified grammar, anyone can learn the terms of a programming language. And you don't need to have English fluency for that.
And also as the IT revolution has spread, the market for computer programs has become more international, and U.S. companies are localizing their programs to fit a lot of different languages. Something called Unicode, for example, is being used instead of ASKII because it can encompass more alphabets. It was explained to me that it has two bytes per character instead of one byte per character to enable these programs to be written in other languages. So I think that the point I would make is that as a recipient for the Internet, as the buyer for Internet use, you don't really need fluency in English.
On the other hand, if you want to be a seller in the Internet world, it's much harder obviously to write programs, to write software, if you are not a native speaker or if you are not fluent in English. It is just a more difficult task. And obviously, if your country wants to be on the cutting edge of IT technology, as Japan has said it does want to be, then it has to compete outside of Japan, and therefore obviously fluency in English would be critical.
Widjajanto (Indonesia)
Indonesia has another problem than compared to another country. To an IT user in Indonesia, and I think it's the smallest in the world due to inadequate infrastructures, only in major big cities do we have a very good access. What I'm talking about very good access is about 56,000 kilobytes per second, less than one megabyte per second. It is very, very slow. But according to the latest survey by the Indonesian government and an IT agency about the plain awareness survey on Internet users in Indonesia, they found that about 95% of Indonesian users go to English websites such as Yahoo, amazon.com, or hotmail. Among these English websites that are very, very popular in my country, the government asked them what kind of language are you using on the Net, all of them replied, 98%, using Bahasa Indonesia or Indonesian language, and only one point something using English.
I would like to give you another example of Indonesian action of Inglish, Indonesian English. A lot of Indonesian English always puts another "dong." In Singlish we use "la," "okay la." But in Indonesia, we use "okay, dong." One of our radio presenters in Indonesia is very famous, and every morning he uses this word and mixes it up with other words. When he says "Good-Pagi, selamat-morning," "Pagi" means morning, "selamat" means good. So he mixes it up. "Good-Pagi, selamat-morning" to give us a view that we are speaking in English not in Inglish, Indonesian English.
So how does Indonesia cope with this problem? Firstly, the Indonesian government has already opened investment in multimedia and IT. A lot of Internet users in Indonesia are demanding not only English but also Indonesian language and also some mixed local languages. For your information, Indonesia comprises 17,000 islands and more than 600 local languages.
So speaking about the national language, we also have until we are still trying struggle with what we call our national language. For autonomic purposes, we do use the national standard, but for lingua franca or daily speaking, we use local and national standard languages. Now we have another problem with the IT revolution.
Another problem that came up later on is some of Internet users quite often get a misunderstanding in reading English content. So one Indonesian software company has developed an automatic translator so it can interpret automatically into Indonesian languages. The problem is the software can only cope with the limited English on the Net. I'm sure that in the following years, due to the better education program, I believe most of the Internet users will speak and understand English much better than today.
Chairperson
There are lots of voice recognition systems, translations, on the software. Do we actually need to know English? Can't the technology fill the gap?
Chan
If you just want to be a receiver of information, you know you have a wide variety of choices, but if you want to produce your own content, you know, in English. It's an international language, and there is still no substitute.
Kavi
I think the technology cannot substitute the language, the English language, particularly in cyberspace. I think it's important that we Asian people provide the so-called content "content provider" in English. This is why it matters when a Japanese writes in English about the world, about itself, about its cultures. That is why it is very important that we improve our proficiency of English so that we can contribute the content provider from our point of view, and technology could not help.
Maybe at the moment English is the dominant language. I think in the future there will come a time within Asia whether it's Bahasa Indonesia, Chinese, or Japanese could provide the content if these three languages more wide open or widely used. Of course at the moment, it's English. In the seventeenth and eighteenth century, it was British English.
Tolbert
The scholars of English point out how adaptable English is and how easily you can bring new words into it, and then who knows? Say the number of non-native speakers will soon surpass the number of native speakers, so what does this mean for the future of English? There was a Japanese professor at Keio who said we shouldn't have to apologize for using Japanese English. English is now the language of the world, and so people are saying, "It belongs to us, and we will change it and use it."
On the other hand, if it's going to be an effective tool for communicating internationally, it seems to me that there needs to be some kind of standards. I would love to see a style book for English usage on the Internet. There is apparently a style book put out by Wired magazine published this year called Principles of English Usage in the Digital Age. The Washington Post has a style book, the Associated Press has a style book.
And I think that a style book would be very useful for the Internet, so that you don't have, you know, there is all this jargon in the Internet, and I think that people work within the Internet can understand it, but those of us on the outside cannot. So this means that American English has been left behind, and there is something else out there that a lot of people are using but that it's hard for those of us who aren't in that circle to sometimes understand what's being said. So, this is sort of one argument, I think, for some kind of global style book.
Chairperson
Maybe it's too soon to say whether we actually need a style book of some sort if it's created by one certain style, so it might be the same as saying, "Let's speak in an American style." Maybe we need a role model in some cases. Do we need the role model?
Chan
One, in terms of technology, it would not replace the English to be obsolete for the Web, or less important for the Web. But it is providing solutions. For instance, one area of research going on is called "transcoding" or "automatic translation." So the internal codes can be transferable.
And the other, in terms of what is the standard English. In other words, there is a whole school of research and study and proponents that there should be accepted, there should be a brand of English that is accepted as a standard. Not so much as a standard, but is acceptable, and we will call it "world English." Actually, I brought it with me.
Kwan
We in Singapore, I believe, have not tried to explain what that means either. For us, standard English is English that a native speaker would understand. Be he or she from the U.S. or Britain or Australia.
Kavi
Yes, we should not worry too much about standard English. It's good to have Thai speaking Thai accent, Indonesian accent, Japanese accent. But when they get together, they speak in English that is intelligible because you need to have identity of the speaker. It is the English that can be used as a vehicle for exchanging information and discussion.
Widjajanto
In this IT revolution area, we should think locally but speak globally. Maybe we can think and speak in English, but please do not diminish or undermine your own identity or your own language.
Localization of English and the Future of Standard English
Kavi
I think the future of English is shifting from the native speaker to the other group of speakers. So with that kind of tendency, the future of English will be colorful and with a little bit trend toward Asian side.
But it would depend on how well China and Japan internalize and express themselves in English. If Japan overcome this mindset and break the ritual part, I think Japan can play the leading role.
I think that if China and Japan overcome that, their input into the English language will be tremendous. So with these two heavyweights being able to use English and feel comfortable with it, it would shape the future of English definitely.
Midori Hanabusa (Japan)
I would of course agree to a certain extent with Kavi that Japanese definitely would need to change their mindset towards learning English and using English. However, the reason why Japanese have developed such a mindset towards English has to do and is tied in very closely with the way Japanese looked at English as a tool to absorb advanced information from role models in the world. And this has been a mindset since the beginning of Japanese history. Of course, China at the beginning was the role model, and Chinese had been the lingua franca for Japan for over 1,000 years. The Japanese had strived to attain a very high level of proficiency in that language, and in the Meiji era, at the end of the ninteenth century, the government decided to transform or shift this emphasis to the languages spoken by the three major powers of that day, which were England, France, and Germany. So for the Japanese it has always been, learning English has always been looking up to somebody else. And looking up to a teacher as an apprentice and as such has created this mentality that the language itself is not something of their own to internalize and localize, but it is something that they or we are using as a guest in order to absorb information from those countries. And I would definitely agree with Kavi that we would need to change this mindset.
Chan
Actually mindset is very much an issue for the Chinese, too. I mean, China is launching a massive campaign to encourage its population to learn English. And then you have a lot of entrepreneurs. And then actually one of the most successful English teachers and very entrepreneurial is this man, Mr. Lee, who teaches "Crazy English." I think that's also our problem in Hong Kong. I mean that's another issue we've been teaching English for such long years. We start teaching the kids, immerse them in English, which is cruel. I wouldn't advise it. At age three, four, you know, so the whole debate about policy, but that's the problem of teaching English to Chinese students or to adults. They get embarrassed because they always think, "I have to speak proper English to utter the word." So this made success, and that's an indicator of the need to change the mindset.
Kwon
Ms. Tolbert told the advent of uni code in 1990 was a milestone to construct a new translation system. It uses 16 bytes for one character rather 8 bytes, so it widespreads the character expression capacity to maximum of 65,535 characters. It turns green light to a minor ranking, because theoretically every language of the world could be translated on the same base. The survival of each language, so I think, depends on the machine translating capability. Translating programs are divided in two. One is information acquisition, and the other is information offering. Information acquisition is enough to allow to understand the information in other languages. But information offering needs delicate ability to translate such a good explanation. So I think IT has two ways of attitude to English. One is English friendship environment, so more and more people could use English, but the other one is making it easy to understand information in their own language by IT technology. And Mr. Kavi told the people that technology is not important, that the content is more important. But the technology also has a good support to their own language.
Kavi
This is a very interesting attitude to learning English between Thailand and Singapore. Of course, Singapore is very proper in doing things, the Thai is not. We are more pragmatic. We stress the sort of utilization much more. This is why we also have our own problem that when students, when they speak English, they use wrong syntax. For example, when the Thai speak English, sometimes it sounds very rude. Because they say, "Go." We don't use, "Please go." They don't say, "Can I help you?" They say, "Help me." That sort of thing. So I think this is a cultural impingement on the way we do.
Chairperson
What is good English in Singapore? What is the role model?
Kwan
It has often been said that the best role model we have is the English spoken by our former prime minister, Mr. Lee Kwan Yew, but in fact I think we are only just beginning the effort. Maybe in one generation we might achieve what we want, but our big problem is this, that we cannot get our teachers to speak properly, we can't get the students to speak properly either. So the chicken-and-egg problem that we have not been able to solve yet.
Tolbert
The United States is actually having a problem holding onto English as its language, and 25 states have passed laws designating English as the official language of the state. At the same time, President Clinton signed a bill into law, a bill that says the United States is a multilingual nation and that any program receiving funds has to make sure, if somebody doesn't speak English, that everyone has access to the benefits and services in their language. So there is a struggle going on in the United States, with the number of Spanish speakers, Chinese speakers, Korean speakers has really gone up by amazing percentages.
Chairperson
With the localization, people have adopted English into their own culture and created English, new Englishes. How is that going to affect the rest of the world? Will there be a standard English in the future? What would you say the situation is in Japan?
Hanabusa
This situation in Japan is that we have a habit of, I guess it is a localization of foreign terminology, we have our katakana, which have proliferated throughout the media, throughout government, and also permeates our conversation as well. We already have so many of these katakana words which are originally English by translating or by simply adding the original terminology, the word, in English in brackets behind the katakana version. I think that would have a great effect in making us realize where the word actually comes from. So I think that's a place that maybe we should start, not just by looking at the katakana problem as a problem, but perhaps as a springboard for improving our English language proficiency.
Kwon
We say "side mirror" instead or "rear mirror," and we use the "hand phone" instead of "cellular phone." That kind of conceptual use is very popular in Korea, because the Korean language is very scientific and excellent. But the weakness is the point that Hangul, the language in Korea, is not good at making new words. So we use many Chinese characters in long history, and these days we use the English as a conceptual idea. So we have our own expression in English, and so it goes on. And I think the localization of English is inevitable, so I hope the globalization of English is a kind of comprehensive English into every word emerges. And many scholars think about that. And some traditional English scholars don't like global English, because it tainted pure English. But I think it is inevitable, because widespread English is effectual in that situation.
Tolbert
Well, I think that if katakana is the springboard English, it is going to be incomprehensible to the rest of the world. Katakana is the hardest part of Japanese to learn for foreigners, I've found, and we are always struggling to understand what a katakana word actually means. And the problem also with katakana is that it's not simply the English word said in the Japanese syllabic alphabet, but it's often a combination. Well, of course, there are words like "Pokemon," and a lot of Americans didn't understand that that came from "pocket" and "monster," but they just thought "Pokemon" was a Japanese word. But I'm told for example that the Japanese word "ippan," which I guess means sort of "general," and then people, so that young people say "ippan people," meaning us common folk. But they call "panpi," so the "pan" from "ippan" and "pi" from "people," so we have "panpi." This is nowhere close to an English word. So I think thatês a big problem in Japan.
Kavi
Well, we have incorporated a lot of English words in Thai language, but we don't have the statistics. I believe that at least 200 or 300 words, like "globalization" or "transparency," this kind of word, including terms from science. But we have a new phenomenon in Thailand: Speak Thai with an English accent. No, this is actually if you listen to Thai music, because the rhythm of rock and roll, so to tend, I think it has happened with Japanese too, but it's all proliferating that. Now, you have funny accent of Thai language that duplicates English. Rap music, rock and roll, that kind of thing. And I think that is not a healthy trend in my opinion.
Widjajanto
Some Indonesian students have a problem with this standardization in English. If you are going to an American university, you have to apply with the TOEFL test, Test of English as a Foreign Language System. If you go to Britain or other Commonwealth countries, you have to apply for IELTS, International English for Language Testing System. For us Indonesian students, we do not know which benchmark is good for our career in the future or even for the universities. So maybe it's good to discuss this morning, should we develop our own Asian benchmark for English standardization for academic purposes, as well as business purposes, or should we just follow these two test systems?
Chairperson
So should we have an Asian standard English?
Chan
I think the bottom line is really a matter of politics. I mean, language is an extremely political issue. Like Kavi said, it's true that words like "guanxi" have gotten into the English language, but it only became acceptable because Americans said it's acceptable when they incorporated it into their dictionary.
Taking a long view, I think, look at Chinese history, every revolutionary change in language policy follows a political revolution, and it's backed by state political power. The Chinese language is in a mess today because the political situation in China is in a flux. China is not recognized. I mean, its authority is being challenged. You have one country, two systems. You have Taiwan. And the state of the Chinese language reflects the political reality.
So I think that in terms of English, in terms of future language, I think for a long time as long as North America and Western countries hold the dominant economic and political power, they will set the standards. If we come together, China, Japan, and all the other Asian countries, can we produce a benchmark? Possibly. But politics and economics, those are the bottom line.
Kavi
I think that political systems have much to do with the utilization of language. As it is today, I don't think anybody would imagine Putonghua being the language here. But I think in the future, maybe 50 to 100 years.
Chairperson
Concerning the Asian benchmark standard English, what would you say to that idea, Mr. Kwan?
Kwan
Personally I think it is futile to harbor any hopes that one day there will be any benchmark, because I think that as more and more speak English, you are only going to see more and more varieties of English. The Singapore government, for instance, would be only too pleased to get rid of Singlish from the face of this Earth, but I think they know that that will never happen. So what we should be doing in all our countries, and even in the case of Japan, is to recognize the fact that there are all these different forms of English. And I think Japan has taken one step towards this. As many of you know, Japan has a program where the government invites native speakers from other countries to serve as assistant language teachers in schools to teach English. And for the first time this year, Japan has invited several of our young people from Singapore to serve as assistant English teachers in Japanese schools. So before too long you might hear Singlish on the streets of Tokyo.
Widjajanto
I think the bottom line is not about politics mainly, but also how we should coordinate and work together these two systems. I don't know about other countries. Do you have IELTS and TOEFL system? But I think these two systems should work together so they can develop and accelerate English as a global language, especially for some non-native speakers, like Indonesian or other Asian countries.
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