The great strength of English is that anyone can play. There's no Academie Anglaise to safeguard the language from mutilation by foreigners. Whereas a Frenchman might be outraged at the foreign word 'weekend' appearing as le weekend an Englishman is delighted to use English words like esprit, film noir, weltanschaung and so on. He likes to make them feel at home by giving them all the grammatical decoration the other words have (slap an "s" on to make a plural or a possessive - anywhere at the end of the word is fine, we're all friends here - if you have an apostrophe about your person then stick it in there for a possessive, but we'll get what you mean anyhow). And they are welcome to join in with other words to make even more words. I'm feeling espritfull today. David Mamet's next film has a noirish flavour. (I defy you to make a neologism out of weltanschaung).

So my first point is just this: anyone can play. If you get your point across, it's English. We don't know from grammar over here anyway - hardly any inflexions, pretty much zero gender. But. We stuff meaning in anyhow. Short sentences? Fine!

My second point is, Native Speakers Of English is itself a pretty broad church. It's quite noticeable that, although six of the last fifteen Nobel Laureates for Literature were native speakers, none of them was actually English. And each wrote in a different way.

Having said that, there is a canon of "proper" English, which a non-native speaker may want to learn for business / credibility purposes. More important, to my mind, there is also a canon of Beautiful English, the English of Shakespeare, Jane Austen, George Orwell and all the other Olympians. To draw out some of the elegance, expressive power and sheer bravura idiomacity of the English language seems to me a good reason to learn "proper" English. I'd be delighted to offer the opinions of a native speaker to anyone who wants to sharpen up his or her English in that way.

But only if that's what you enjoy. If you just want to get your point across - you are free! Use it how it works! There's more than one way to say it!

§ George Sherston

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