English, Chinglish or China English?

Abstract

Roughly 90,000 taxi drivers in Beijing learned English in preparation for the Summer Olympic Games (Beijing 2008) of some 600,000 total residents of the city that have jumped on the English bandwagon in the past few years (People's Daily, 2001). China is a country of nearly a billion and a half people, most of whom now begin learning English at the age of ten (Dong, 2005: 11). A simple Google search for ‘English in China’ yields more than 36,000,000 results! It cannot be argued that English is unpopular in the Middle Kingdom. With so many learners there, it stands to reason that a variety of English peculiar to China would eventually develop, and there is much evidence to suggest that it has already begun.