Accents of English worldwide 13

Virtually all the remaining countries of the world (excluding native-language and
second-language countries) are foreign-language environments, since English is taught
and learnt throughout the world.
A further complicating factor is the existence in many countries of official languages.
This confers official recognition on the languages. However, the term official language is
rather an imprecise one. Official languages:

• may or may not be the languages used in the law

• may or may not be the medium of instruction in schools
• may differ in different regions of a country
• may be the languages of former colonizers, as is often the case with English and
French
• may be minority languages
• need not be spoken by everyone in the country.

Many countries have more than one official language, and some countries have no offi-
cial language.
Crystal (1997) gives the figures of 320–380 million native speakers of English,
150–300 million second-language speakers, and 100–1,000 million foreign-language
speakers. These figures are necessarily imprecise, because of the problems of definition
outlined above.
In short, English is not a homogeneous monolith. There is a lot of accent variation
caused by the fact that it is spoken throughout the world. Like other languages, there is
also sociolinguistic variation caused by factors such as the formality of the situation. For
this reason, it is not unusual nowadays to hear the term English languages (for example,
McArthur, 1998) to encompass this variation.
It is impossible, in a book this size, to cover the pronunciation of all the major accents
of English. The two major world accents used as the references in this book are a stan-
dard US one, and a standard southern British one.
The US accent is known as General American (GenAm), and ‘is what is spoken by the
majority of Americans, namely those who do not have a noticeable eastern or southern
accent’ (Wells, 2008, p. xiv).
The British accent used to be referred to as Received Pronunciation, a term conceived
in the first half of the 20th century by the British phonetician Daniel Jones. However,
that term, like The Queen’s English, is considered out-of-date now, and other labels such
as standard southern British English (SSBE) and BBC English (Jones, 2006) are used. The
term SSBE is used in this book.

Other languages
This book is about the pronunciation specifically of English. However, since it is aimed
at teachers of English to foreigners who, by definition, come to English classes already
speaking other languages fluently, the book also sometimes touches on pronunciation
features of other languages. It does this in order to emphasize that English is not a supe-
rior or more basic language than others. Consideration of other languages is also needed
in order to explain phonetic concepts, some of which do not occur in English. Most