Language adopted by the indigenous communities through the process of adaptations and innovations from indigenous cultures. A form of language that is an accepted standard or a way of behaving or doing things that most people from their own community understand and agree with.
Published in Chapter:
Performing Speech Acts: Focussing on Local Cultural Norms in the Englishes We Use
Maya Khemlani David (University of Malaya, Malaysia) and Aliyyah Nuha Faiqah Azman Firdaus (University of Malaya, Malaysia)
Copyright: © 2021
|Pages: 17
DOI: 10.4018/978-1-7998-2831-0.ch005
Abstract
When we speak we use speech acts. Examples of speech acts include performing greetings, giving compliments and responding to compliments, making complaints and responding to complaints, making and responding to requests, congratulating, and consoling. In English language textbooks we normally see one response to some of these speech acts. For example, “thank you” as a response to a compliment or “good morning/afternoon/evening” as a greeting. As English has become a world language spoken by non-native speakers of English, many non-nativised cultural norms when performing speech acts are noted in real-time interactions. In this chapter, examples of nativised speech acts expressed in acceptable English are drawn from a number of data sources ranging from both real-time interactions, literary sources, which are a reflection of life, and social media, which encompass Facebook, Messenger, WhatsApp messages. Pedagogical ramifications of such authentic real-time data are discussed. The result will be the teaching of the English emerging from localised cultural norms in the speech acts we perform.