Some years back I attended a lecture on world English. The lecturer gave a very interesting presentation, with many insights that woke up a monster inside me from its long slumber. The presentation was about a study by Evelyn Nien-ming Ch’ien, when she was Assistant Professor of English at the University of Hartford.
The lecturer (whose name I still need to retrieve from my archives) quoted extensively from Ms. Ch’ien’s monumental 352-page work, which celebrated world English by tagging it as weird English. Explained simply, weird English is non-native English, which typically drops many of the arcane and complex rules of English grammar so that its non-native speakers can comfortably express their own cultures. Continue reading “So I speak weird English. So what?”