The Soft Ideological Underbelly of the Notion of Intelligibility in Discussions about World Englishes
Applied Linguistics, (2010)Abstract
The term intelligibility is widely viewed as denoting an ideologically neutral concept and therefore useful in speculating about the future of the English language, especially in the context of its expansion at the current exponential rate and the danger or otherwise of its breaking up into mutually incomprehensible languages, the way Latin did in the Middle Ages. It has also been bandied about in the context of English language teaching, especially to speakers of other languages. In this piece, I question the status of intelligibility as an ideologically innocent concept and argue that the adjective intelligible is analogous to others such as beautiful, ugly, easy, difficult, primitive, civilized, and so forth, which are also sometimes used with respect to languages, and which we have long learned to regard with suspicion on the grounds that they invariably presuppose the standpoint of someone who furtively manages to remain invisible.