ELTWeekly Vol. 5 Issue#39 | November 11 , 2013 | ISSN 0975-3036

Evolution of human civilizations has it that there has been cross continental communication much before the idea of English as an international language existed. For centuries there has been international trade done across the continents. Traders have been interacting with one another. Undoubtedly, with difficulties at both the ends,           i.e. speaker and listener, they somehow devised some strategies and managed to communicate. Therefore, those who are in genuine need of communication have found out ways and means to communicate. With the passage of time, one single language medium gained centrality in various human activities. It became thereafter imperative to standardize the information transaction amongst the concerned users with their different backgrounds. Hence, the question of intelligibility of one language medium amidst its disparate users has attracted researcher’s attention globally.

Intelligibility in English indeed is a concern in EFL and EIL contexts, yet the situation is not as alarming as we perceive it to be. With regards intelligibility Smith states:

‘My response …is that for at least last two hundred years there have been English speaking people in some parts of the world who have not been intelligible to other English speaking people in other parts of the world it is a natural phenomenon when any language becomes so wide spread (2006: 430)’. (more…)