In an Age of Global English, the Narrow Definition of "Native" Pronunciation is Nonsensical

"It does not seem like you have native pronunciation" seemed straightforward enough. This is an excerpt from an email from a leading online English language school in Japan, rejecting my application to become part of its roster of part-time tutors. The application itself was simple: I had to submit two separate 30-second video recordings of myself, respectively explaining an idiom and giving a self-introduction. For the evaluator, that one minute of talking, plus my visual looks on camera, was enough to determine that I was not suited for their clientele of many beginners who could not even tell apart accents.

I concede that by some standards, my English pronunciation is far from "native." Having started learning English from scratch at age 12, when I first landed in America, my years of ESL classes as well as moving between the East Coast, California, and Texas only served to confuse, rather than perfect, the way I speak. The fact that I left the US at age 21, traveling the world and picking up English accents from Indians, Filipinos, Malaysians, Tanzanians, Brits, and everyone else in between, only made my claim to "speak with an American accent" ever more questionable.

Yet, the more I reside outside the US, the more I have come to see the very idea as questionable that the Anglosphere (consisting of the US, UK, Australia, New Zealand, Canada, and perhaps South Africa and Ireland) has a monopoly on "native" pronunciation. The many Filipinos, Indians, Malaysians, and Tanzanians I worked with are all educated and gainfully employed in entirely English-speaking environments, giving them full confidence that they can fully communicate in both written and spoken English with English speakers from around the world.

Are their English pronunciation "native" by the standards of the Anglosphere? Far from it. But does that prevent them from getting on with their working and private lives in English? Not at all. In fact, many see and leverage their "non-native" English as a major asset, working in multinational companies with both "native" and "non-native" English speakers from around the world. Residing for their entire lives outside the Anglosphere, they nonetheless illustrate the capabilities that the clientele of the online Japanese school pay so much to achieve: the ability to live and work in the English language.

Indeed, the underlying assumption of the Japanese school, equating not speaking like the people of the Anglosphere with ultimately lacking fluency in English, is an outdated notion in the age of global English. As English language education advances not only in the former British colonies of Asia and Africa but also in the internationally minded bits of continental Europe and the Middle East, the Anglosphere increasingly represents the minority of English speakers. Rather than upholding never-existent pronunciation standards, they risk being subsumed in the new wave of speakers from elsewhere.

This is particularly true in Japan. Given stagnant wages, the country is increasingly unattractive for workers from the Anglosphere. The average Japanese seeking to practice business English is much more likely to do so with their Indian and Filipino coworkers. In such an environment, an exclusive focus on learning to speak like the Americans or the Brits may actually hurt listening comprehension at their international, English-speaking workplace. Their non-Japanese coworkers are likely to care little for the "native" pronunciation that costs a fortune to acquire through online tutoring.

So does this mean that the English-language schools in Japan should no longer care about finding those "native" teachers? Certainly not. Some people are attracted to English for cultural reasons rather than practical ones. If they are motivated to learn with the hope of sounding like a character from Friends or Sex and the City, then online schools have every incentive to ensure that they provide tutors who can furnish them with the opportunity to do so. Judging by the premium commanded by (white) American and British teachers on these platforms, the cultural reason for learning English remains alive and strong.

Yet, it is time that English language tutoring services stop insinuating that there is some narrow definition of "correct" English pronunciations that learners must master before they can go communicate in the language. Global English is fundamentally a diverse one, a conglomeration of different cultural expressions, borrowed terms, grammatical idiosyncrasies, and above all, pronunciations. English has gone global because it has been both adaptable and welcoming of many quirks not found in the Anglosphere and memorable enough to even change the English of the Anglosphere. That is worth celebrating.