The language on which the sun never sets

During the early years of the European settlement of America, slave traders had a language policy. Its outcome has a bearing on how we think about the importance of the multicultural Commonwealth today.

On the ships bearing African slaves to work on the sugar plantations the policy was to maximise the number of different language backgrounds - to make it difficult for rebels to plot together. The outcome: various forms of pidgin communication developed, including one that facilitated communication between the slaves and the English-speaking sailors.

This pidgin continued to serve the communicative needs of the slaves among themselves and between them and the new landowners in the Caribbean. It is out of this creole English that a continuum of varieties of English eventually emerged in the southern plantations of the American mainland and throughout the West Indies; a continuum ranging from the standard English of organised power to various mixtures of standard and local dialects to street varieties which were only spoken.

Caribbean English today, for all its roots in a history of oppression, enriches a global language and its literature. To learn it is to apprentice oneself to a creative engagement with new horizons of experience.

The same can be said for all the distinctive varieties of English that have developed outside England - not only in the US, but every place where the British Empire spread: Canada, Australia, South Africa, West Africa, South Asia, South-East Asia and the South Pacific, and the Mediterranean.

As David Crystal, perhaps the world's foremost authority on the subject, makes clear in his recent The Stories of English (Penguin), the development of these varieties of English must be seen as fundamentally creative. The spread of this Anglo-Saxon language with a gargantuan sense of its incompletion, its readiness to assimilate new experience, vocabularies and forms, has not led to a standardisation of language or culture.

On the contrary, the result is a creative diversity. Alongside standard English, there exist standard regional forms, non-standard forms, emerging standards and informalities. What learning English involves is knowing which variant of English is appropriate to which context. The pedant who insists on the standards of formal written English in conversation has lost his way as much as the writer who writes up her CV in dialect.

Mr Crystal is aware of the prescriptive anxieties of those who (like an English head teacher writing in The Observer 23 years ago) linked the slide of punctilious standards in grammar to a slide in "punctiliousness in such matters as honesty, responsibility, property, gratitude, apology and so on". But his hope is that children will grow up in "a world which is intelligent, responsible, and mature, in its linguistic beliefs and attitudes... which will recognise a federation of standard and non-standard varieties, performing different life functions". Singlish (the colloquial English of Singapore which is mixed with Chinese) used in an internet chat room can speak more truthfully to experience than another variant, and it would be a cultural loss to a Singaporean child not to have access to it.

Mr Crystal advocates those curricula that teach students to explore "the reasons lying behind the choices of words in such contexts as a scientific report, a news broadcast, or an advertising slogan.... to promote a more responsive and responsible approach to language, in which students would come to understand why people use language in the way they do, and would put this knowledge to active use to become more able to control language for themselves".

The nature of culture has some strong resemblances to the nature of language and what Mr Crystal says about the English language and language policy can be adapted to illuminate the nature of multiculturalism. Two parallels are worth highlighting.

First, English has absorbed vocabularies from around the world and has been transformed as a result. But it has borrowed and adapted without losing its character; on the contrary it has become richer as a result, so rich no single individual or region can master it in its entirety. Similarly, cultures, particularly during periods of radical social transition, thrive when they are open to cross-cultural exchange, not when they become enclaves.

Second, one masters English, one controls it for oneself, when one knows how to adapt it to different domains, to the particular role or identity one needs to adopt in a specific context. We would wonder at the career woman who speaks and behaves the same way at work, with friends, and at home. Similarly, a multicultural world is one where people are permitted to adopt multiple cultural identities, depending on the role they are performing. A good education in multiculturalism would be one that taught students not just about different cultures and cultural styles but how to recognise the cultural tradition or community that illuminates their identity when carrying out a certain role.

In the development of such a multicultural curriculum, the Commonwealth, a multicultural network that celebrates a great language by sharing and at the same time diversifying it, can play a role that is, alas, urgently needed.

ranierfsadni@europe.com