Whose property?

All property is theft.

MrP

From the British Council's 1997 publication 'The Future of English' by David Graddol:

“A debate would be timely on how Britain’s ELT providers can co-operatively prepare for the need to build and maintain the British brand and how the promotion of English language goods and services relates to the wider image of Britain as a leading-edge provider of cultural and knowledge-based products.

MrPedanticAll property is theft.

MrP

Which means - re your opinion of the topic?

How about this, Tam:

"The Prince of Wales highlighted the threat to "proper" English from the spread of the American vernacular as he launced a campaign to promote the language as world leader. He described American English as "very corrupting" and emphasised the need to maintain the quality of language..."

The Times, 24th March, 1995.

Yes I know Milky He also wrote a forward praising the BC publication I quoted... I think he and the BC see themselves as 'the defender

<I love the wackiness of it all though! What? British English is the world leader like Coke, and American English is what? Pepsi, or do they mean Brit Speak is a fine wine; American, cheap plonk; and Aussie English is what? An alcopop?>

The problem is that British English is really just a corruption of Anglo Saxon, which in turn was a corruption of Indo-European, which was a corruption of Blah blah blah blah. From this view we should all just stop speaking until we can deduce Proto-human language and speak the "pure" and "uncorrupted" first langauge ever spoke, haha.

This reminds me of an Italian guy I met in Beijing t

If I may post this extract:

As Englishes evolve, skilled users of each English search for solutions to the problem of using the full richness of the new, evolved English while still keeping their utterances comprehensible to users of other Englishes. A comment by Nigerian writer ChinuaAchebe expresses this challenge well and is applicable to most of the world’s Englishes:

The pri

Different Englishes have different ways of hedging, qualifying, softening, joking, insulting. They have different expectations for when indirection is appropriate – and for what is perceived as indirect – for what is perceived as friendly/personal/overfamiliar – and for what is perceived as polite/distant/hostile (Trosberg, 1995).

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More from Nayar, on investigating language fora and the image of the non-native speaker vs. the native-speaker:

"Nayar notices that inadequacies in the use of English are often interpreted as some kind of general deprivation, whether cognitive, itellectual, social or emotional."

"The overall image is that the English learning community is in need of "pastoral care" because