English Audio Request

There are two widespread underlying assumptions here that need to be challenged. The first relates to the ways in which national identity is often understood in terms of ethnicity. As the cultural scholar Paul Gilroy remarked in his book There Ain’t No Black in the Union Jack, in Britain “conceptions of national belonging and homogeneity… not only blur the distinction between ‘race’ and nation, but rely on that very ambiguity for their effect”. The second assumption is that there is an exclusive bond between a language and the nation it naturally belongs to. In turn, these two assumptions combined produce a third one: only those who are the rightful members of a nation, by birth and by race, are legitimate speakers of the language of that nation.
Citing a number of research studies, Holliday made the point that native-speakerism is not a matter of language alone, but is closely connected to ethnicity and race, even though this connection is rarely made explicit. It produces situations of great inequality around the world. In the field of English language teaching, for example, it is not
uncommon for jobs to be available only for native speakers (sometimes explicitly defined as “white” or “Caucasian”), or for non-native speakers to receive significantly lower remuneration even when they possess higher qualifications. This kind of inequity affects migrants in general. A 2011 study found that African migrants’ “accents and varieties of English had been treated as inferior by ‘native speakers’ in traditional English speaking countries”. According to the study, migrants were also, “made to feel as if they were unproficient in English, weak in communication skills, or unintelligible. They got the impression that only speaking in the prestige / native varieties of English counted for proficiency and educational or professional success.”
Native-speakerism is also intertwined with a colonial view of the world where the colonizer is attributed with cultural superiority over the colonized. This mentality has persisted well after the end of colonialism and is so pervasive that it affects the ways non-native speakers see themselves too – as inadequate and defective users of English. Tellingly, the Gambian woman in the Channel 4 segment said, “I don’t have confidence for myself to speak English” - summing up this mindset exactly.
It is important that we become more conscious of the fact that English is not just an “English” language and that the ability to speak it has nothing to do with how “English” a person looks or behaves.