(Wee sleekit Max, is now in hiding, cowering timorously)Been burnsed before have we, Max?
I'm not going to use Max's $9 words to say what I have to say.
The whole supposition behind tsuwm's original, and no doubt intentionally controversial, quote is that there are two (count 'em) two, forms of English and that one is this and the other is that.
Well, sorry, there are a lot more than that. In fact there is at least one dialect of spoken English, with its own whimsy, loan-words from other languages, pronunciation and usage, for every country that uses the core product. The only measure of "quality" is whether other people who speak it can understand it. Generally, but not always, the written form follows the basic rules but you'll find contractions, idioms and wholesale borrowing from other languages mixed in. You can verify this by looking at any newspaper website in any English-speaking country.
Apart from Zild and Strine, which are markedly different from each other (as well as being different from American and British English) and are becoming more so as time goes on, two outstanding examples are Singlish and Filipino English.
Whenever I'm in Singapore I get apologised to at least once for the unthinking use of Singlish. Singapore uses written English not too far removed from the common core, but speaks it much differently. The major difference between Zild and Singlish is that the accent is completely flat, with American vowel sounds. The word order sometimes varies - I'm told this is often due to the Mandarin influence. It's also spoken at something approaching the land speed record. But once you get used to it, you miss very little.
Filipino English sometimes sounds like Tagalog - when Filipinos are speaking to each other you can get a shock to realise that they really are speaking English. "Educated" English is spoken with a twang like an exaggerated American accent. Normal spoken Filipino English includes lots of local dialect words and odd usages of English expressions. This is actually reflected in their newspaper written style, which reads like it was written by a New Zealand 10-year-old with a shaky grasp of grammar at times.
These people use English every day, although it may not always be their first language. But they THINK in English, and that makes them English-speakers in my book.
None of this is judgmental - it's just the way it is. I would guess that there are more people who speak a variety of English which is neither British nor American than there are who do ...
[/rant]
