This is particularly undesirable when the language being stigmatised is that of another racial or ethnic group. In the tutor-learner environment, this is as a practice wrong because it does not and will not work. As most of us know, learning a new language is very challenging. But, learning a new dialect of one's own language is in many ways more difficult because both dialects are so similar, it is hard to keep them apart.

STANDARD ENGLISH

As we have already established, the fact that English is an international language does not mean it is spoken the same everywhere. There are several accepted standards, and even within each of these, there are contradictory and confusing rules. It is a complicated and challenging language. For instance:

Spelling and pronunciation: There are 26 letters in the English alphabet but more than 50 different and distinct sounds. There are two sounds written as [th]: there or forth, yet modern English does not distinguish between them in spelling. These and many other examples show there is considerable distance in English between the sounds of words and their spellings. This is due partly to borrowing from other languages and because spelling only began to be formalised during the 1700s in England. The way we pronounce English words has changed since then but the spelling has not. The result is that 80 percent of English words are not spelled the way they are pronounced.