Do We Need International Standard English?

English is the world’s lingua franca, and non-native speakers now own it. There are roughly 1.5 billion English speakers on the planet, and only a quarter of them are native. The astonishing math is that 96% of English conversations involve at least one person who learned it as a second language. It’s somewhat odd that this majority is told to pick a side when it comes to pronunciation.

British or American?

What’s the frustration nobody talks about?

I grew up speaking Hochdeutsch. It feels clean and phonetic and every sound has a predictable spelling and every word has a clear, agreed-upon pronunciation. What is more it isn’t associated with any one region of Germany.

This standard is not a Bavarian, not a Swiss, not a Berlin dialect. It’s a neutral, internationally recognized target that exists precisely so everyone, native and non-native alike, has something to aim for.

Now I try to improve my English pronunciation, and I’m offered a false choice.

My options, apparently:

British English (Received Pronunciation)

Everyone who’s tried to put on a British English accent for size, knows the theatrical, affected feeling it leaves you with. Diphthongs slide around like they’re trying to escape and the non-rhotic R feels unnatural if you didn’t grow up with it. “Bo’ol o’ wa’er” anyone? You sound like a parody and I say that as someone who likes the clean, open and well enunciated sound of British English.

American English (General American)

Under-enunciated consonants that blur together. That retroflex R that’s impossible to produce naturally without years of practice. Vowel reductions that turn every unstressed syllable into “uh”. Regional variations that differ wildly from what “General American” supposedly means.

Pick one. Commit to it. Either way, you’ll be marked as non-native by anyone who listens closely.

How did other languages solve this problem?

Standard German is a constructed standard based on written German, deliberately chosen to be neutral across regions. It moderates the features of various dialects into something clean and learnable. Does anyone actually speak pure Hochdeutsch natively? Maybe some people in Hannover. Maybe. But it exists as an abstract target, a shared reference point that allows clear communication across the German-speaking world.

Growing up, I wasn’t told to pick between Bavarian and Saxon. There was a standard, and that’s what I spoke.

The Netherlands has “Algemeen Beschaafd Nederlands,” literally “General Civilized Dutch.” It’s the Dutch you hear on news broadcasts. It’s what non-native speakers learn. Does it match any specific city’s dialect? No. That’s the point.

English resists this. It’s spoken natively in multiple countries with distinct phonological traditions: the UK, US, Australia, Canada, Ireland, South Africa. There’s no central authority. No Académie Française for English. No official body to declare what “standard” means.

So we’re left with competing national standards, each carrying cultural baggage, each marking you as “trying to sound British” or “trying to sound American.”

What happened to Mid-Atlantic English?

There used to be something like a standard: Mid-Atlantic English, Transatlantic English, the accent you heard from newsreaders in the mid-20th century, from Cary Grant and Katharine Hepburn.

It was deliberately neutral, neither fully British nor fully American. Phonetician William Tilly codified it at Columbia University in the 1920s, taught it in acting schools and elocution courses, designed it to transcend regional and national borders. It was clear and learnable.

Then it was abandoned.

Why? Post-World War II, American culture shifted toward authenticity, equality, regional identity. The Transatlantic accent came to be seen as artificial, elitist, old-fashioned. Method acting demanded naturalistic speech. American broadcasters moved toward “General American.” British broadcasters stuck with RP but diversified.

The international learner was left without a target.

Has anyone tried to create an international English standard?

In 2000, linguist Jennifer Jenkins published The Phonology of English as an International Language, proposing what she called the “Lingua Franca Core,” a stripped-down set of pronunciation features that non-native speakers actually need for mutual intelligibility.

Her argument was radical: stop teaching pronunciation as imitation of native speakers. Teach what actually matters for communication between non-natives, which is the majority of English conversations anyway.

The Lingua Franca Core includes consonant sounds, vowel length distinctions, and word stress, but notably excludes features like the ‘th’ sounds, weak forms, and connected speech patterns that non-natives struggle with but rarely cause real misunderstanding.

It was controversial. It still is. But Jenkins named the problem: we’ve been teaching English pronunciation as if the goal is to infiltrate native speaker communities, when in reality most English conversations happen between people who learned it as a second language.

What do international speakers actually want?

Most non-native English speakers I know don’t want to “sound British” or “sound American.” What they want is to be understood clearly without repeating themselves, to sound professional in international contexts without being marked as imitating a specific nationality. A learnable target, not a moving goalpost. And ideally some reassurance that their accent isn’t permanently “fossilized” just because they started late.

We want what exists for German, for Dutch, for Mandarin with pǔtōnghuà: a standard, a reference, a target that isn’t someone else’s local identity.

What might an International Standard English sound like?

Imagine an English pronunciation standard designed for international communication:

Rhotic but moderate Rs instead of the full American retroflex, not the British non-rhotic, just enough R to be unambiguous. Vowel distinctions that are clear without the theatrical British diphthongs or the American habit of reducing everything to “uh.” Consonants that are fully articulated, where T actually sounds like T, and stress patterns that follow predictable rules.

Newsreader English, basically. The English of international conferences, aviation, diplomacy. The English that already exists in functional form but lacks official recognition or pedagogical support.

”But accents are beautiful and diverse”

Yes. And nobody is proposing eliminating regional accents.

Hochdeutsch didn’t kill Bavarian. I grew up with both. Standards and dialects coexist everywhere.

A standard isn’t about erasing diversity. It’s about providing a shared reference point, a neutral option for those who want one. Right now, if you’re a non-native English speaker, you don’t have that option. You’re forced to cosplay as British or American, always marked as an outsider attempting to infiltrate.

The elephant in the room

Any proposed standard would face accusations of cultural imperialism and privileging certain speakers over others. Fair enough.

But all language standards are constructed. Hochdeutsch was a deliberate project. Modern Standard Arabic is a scholarly creation that nobody speaks at home. Someone always has to make decisions.

The alternative is what we have now: hundreds of millions of English learners without a clear target.

Is this even possible?

Probably not in my lifetime. The political and cultural obstacles are enormous. English’s decentralized nature is both its strength and its curse.

But it’s worth naming the frustration. English is the world’s lingua franca, and it doesn’t offer the world a way to speak it neutrally.

We’re all forced into someone else’s accent. Someone else’s cultural markers. Mouth movements that evolved for native speakers, not for us.

Maybe that’s fine. Maybe that’s just how it is.

But every time I practice my retroflex R or try to decide whether to say “can’t” with a British or American vowel, I think: there has to be a better way.

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If you’re a non-native speaker with opinions on this, I’d like to hear them.

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References

Jenkins, J. (2000). The Phonology of English as an International Language. Oxford University Press.

Walker, R. (2010). Teaching the Pronunciation of English as a Lingua Franca. Oxford University Press.