Whose English? Language Ownership in Singapore’s English Language Debates

Abstract

This chapter examines language ownership in the English language debates in Singapore. It discusses the idealization of the so-called native speaker found within the native-speaker (NS)/non-native-speaker (NNS) dichotomy, as well as the unwillingness to recognize the different varieties of world Englishes as legitimate languages. It proposes a model of language ownership that moves away from the limitations of NS/NNS discourses, and focuses instead on speakers' orientations towards English norms to foreground speakers' degree of ownership of the English they speak.

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