EnglishLanguage

From UoWiki

Tower Hamlets is a Babel of many languages, the most prominent of which is Sylheti, a dialect related to Bengali spoken in a mountainous region of Bangladesh. Most male Sylheti speakers living in England acquire at least a rudimentary knowledge of English, but the women often do not. This presumably relates to differing educational achievements (illiteracy in one's mother tongue is an obstacle to acquisition of subsequent languages), fewer opportunities for interaction with native English speakers (it's veil-o-rama round here), satellite TV, housing policy (aka "the ghetto") and so on.

The liberal sop for all this is "multiculturalism": an underfunded attempt to provide translation and "advocacy" services to linguistic minorities. But it's less than ideal. Firstly, there are many situations in which translation, however skilful, is inferior to direct communication: in the doctor's surgery for sure, and also presumably, in many legal and housing contexts. Of course, appropriate skilful translation is not universally available, nor, I doubt, is anything but a fraction of potentially relevant and useful civic information available in translation into any of Tower Hamlets' major languages.

Multilingualism is draggy and shared standards would be preferable. And in London, England, 2005, that standard is English. Compulsion and education do not mix. But one thing the UO could certainly do is support those wishing to acquire English. There is a particularly stupid rule in many instituted educational establishments that charges students overseas rates until they have been resident in the UK for three years. But the first three years of residence is just when English language instruction would be most helpful and useful.

A self institution like the UO could be doing this.

The poem TeachingEnglishAsAKnuckleSandwich now has its own page.

Also see http://ourmayday.org/cgi-bin/wiki.pl?TheLanguageOfCulturalImperialism

One way round all this shit might be MelanesianPidgin