ABSTRACT: The current study investigated whether the change toward more gender-inclusive English that is taking place in Inner Circle countries is also gaining acceptance for English usage in an Outer Circle country: Singapore. Data for the study came principally from a questionnaire completed by students at a Singapore junior college and from writing scripts of students at the same college. Results suggest that gender-inclusive English was viewed favourably by many students. Perhaps even more tellingly, gender-inclusive forms appeared in many students' writing. Thus, it appears that a ripple effect has occurred, in which changes in Inner Circle countries and in their varieties of English have been a factor in changes in Outer Circle forms.
English has spread from those Inner Circle countries (Kachru 1995, 1997) where it is spoken as a native language by the majority of the population, e.g., New Zealand, to Outer Circle countries, which are former colonies of Inner Circle countries and where English has long played a major role, e.g., Sri Lanka, and to Expanding Circle countries, where English is a foreign language, but is now playing a greater role as a major vehicle of globalization, e.g, Brazil.
The English of the Inner Circle countries has a key impact on the development of the English language elsewhere. However, this Inner Circle English is, like all living language varieties, in a constant state of change. These changes in Inner Circle English have a potential ripple effect on English elsewhere. This article reports a descriptive study which investigated the possibility of such a ripple effect from one change in Inner Circle English - the shift toward more gender-inclusive usage - and the presence of this change in the English of 17- and 18-year-old students in an Outer Circle country in Southeast Asia, Singapore.
Gender-inclusive English
The term gender-inclusive means that both females and males are explicitly "included" in the language used. Terms similar to gender-inclusive are gender-neutral, sex-fair, nonsexist, and gender-free (Treichler and Frank 1989). These terms contrast with gender-exclusive language in which words referring to one sex are used generically to refer to both sexes. Over the past approximately 30 years, Inner Circle countries have seen a partial shift away from gender-exclusive usage (e.g. American Psychological Association Task Force on Issues of Sexual Bias in Graduate Education 1975), which had been dominant for at least the past 200 years, toward gender-inclusive. Crystal (1995: 368) described this shift and the reasons behind it:
There is now a widespread awareness, which was lacking a generation ago, of the way in which language covertly displays social attitudes towards men and women. The criticisms have been mainly directed at the biases built into English vocabulary and grammar which reflect a traditionally male-oriented view of the world, and which have been interpreted as reinforcing the low status of women in society. All of the main European languages have been effected, but English more than most, because of the early impact of the feminist movement in the USA.
By the 1990s, this shift had gained further institutionalized support. For instance, on the front cover of the Random House Webster's College Dictionary (1995) in addition to boasting that their dictionary is the newest, biggest, and best, the publishers also advertise that it features nonsexist guidelines.
The present study investigated two aspects of this trend toward gender-inclusive English:
However, change is not a linear process. For instance, Rubin, Greene, and Schneider (1994) reported more resistance to gender-inclusive English among U.S. university students than among older people. Further, they also found that change was not evenly distributed; females were more likely than males to use gender-inclusive English. Indeed, their study demonstrates that language variation is both diachronic (over time) and synchronic (at one particular point in time).
English in Singapore
Singapore has developed its own indigenized variety of English (Tay 1993). As the English which develops in Outer and Expanding Circle countries reflects the linguistic and cultural situation of those countries (Kachru 1995), it may be asked whether the conditions which led to the shift toward gender-inclusive English in Inner Circle countries are also present in Singapore and elsewhere. Such an analysis is beyond the scope of this article. Instead, the present study was restricted to examining the presence or absence of gender-inclusive English in the writing of a group of Singaporean junior college students. The researchers are aware of no previous studies of this issue.
Singapore is an Outer Circle country. A former British colony, this multi-lingual nation now has English as one of its four official languages, the medium of instruction from the first year of schooling, and its main lingua franca (Cheah 1996). The large majority of Singaporeans are not native speakers of English, and the government has generally succeeded in helping people maintain proficiency in one of the other three official languages: Chinese, Malay, and Tamil.
Changes in labour and educational patterns which have occurred in Inner Circle countries, such as greater work force participation by women, more women in prestige occupations, and higher levels of educational attainment by women, are also present in Singapore (Arumainathan 1973, Lau 1993). Such social changes are believed to correlate with language change (Wolfson 1989).
Despite these changes, Singapore's prestige English language newspaper, the Straits Times and its Sunday edition the Sunday Times, use gender-exclusive English. For instance, the following headline appeared on page 33 of the Sunday Times of 16 August 1998 "Killer Floods in China: Nature's Fury, Man's Folly", and the following sentence appeared on page 7 of a 15 August, 1998 Straits Times supplement on Singapore secondary schools, "Once a child receives a fee subsidy, this assistance will be given until he finishes secondary school" (emphasis added). This policy was confirmed by the paper's editor (Fong, personal communication, 20 August 1998). Further, a Straits Times columnists (Tan 1995: 7, cited in Gupta & Chew 1995) referring to similar efforts at language reform, this time in support of people with disabilities, spoke out against what he called "the style of the politically correct in the West", fearing that it would impoverish the English language, curb freedom of expression, and have no effect because "sticks and stones can break my bones but words can never hurt me".
The major television network in Singapore, the Television Corporation of Singapore (TCS), does not a stated policy on the issue of gender-exclusive/gender-inclusive English. People whom we talked to there stated that it was left to the discretion of those involved in a particular programme. One person involved in training at TCS indicated that she had not been very aware of the issue until while recently doing a masters degree it was brought to her attention by her lecturers.
Purpose of the study
This study aimed to provide information on the following questions:
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