Varieties of English Around the World (vols. G1–55, T1–9,1979–2015)

The present book describes the English language in all its facets as spoken in present-day Dublin, the capital of the Republic of Ireland. It covers the entire range of its history since the first arrival of English there several hundred years ago. Apart from the evolution of English in the capital, the book also concentrates on the significant changes which have been taking place in the speech of Dublin in the past 15 years or so. The rapid change of Dublin English is seen as a correlate to the many social and economic developments which have occurred in recent years. The type of linguistic change in Dublin is driven by dissociation (the mirror-image of accommodation) and will be of particular interest to scholars working within the ‘language variation and change’ framework as it will to those more generally concerned with varieties of English and their specific profiles vis à vis more standard forms of English.

This volume, a detailed empirical study of the creole English spoken in the Bahamian capital, Nassau, contributes to our understanding of both urban creoles and tense-aspect marking in creoles. The first part traces the development of a creole in the Bahamas via socio-demographic data and outlines its current status and functions vis-à-vis the standard in politics, the media, and education. The linguistic chapters combine typological and variationist methods to describe exhaustively a comprehensive grammatical subsystem, past temporal reference, offering a discourse-based approach to such controversial categories as the preverbal past marker. The quantitative analysis of variable past inflection, finally, tests not only well-known constraints, such as stativity or social class, but also ethnographically determined ones, such as narrative type. Its results are relevant not only to the study of Caribbean English-lexifier creoles and related varieties, such as African American English, but also to variation and change in urban dialects generally.

English competes with Tagalog and Taglish, a mixture of English and Tagalog, for the affections of Filipinos. To understand the competing ideologies that underlie this switching between languages, this book looks at the language situation from multiple perspectives. Part A reviews the social and political forces that have propelled English through its life cycle in the Philippines from the 1898 arrival of Admiral Dewey to the 1998 election of Joseph Estrada. Part B looks at the social support for English in Metro Manila and the provinces with a focus on English teachers and their personal and public use of English. Part C examines the language of television sport broadcasts, commercials, interviews, sitcoms, and movies, and the language of newspapers from various linguistic, sociolinguistic, and sociocultural perspectives. The results put into perspective the short-lived language revolution that took place at the turn of the twenty-first century.

The dialect of North-East Scotland, one of the most distinctive and best preserved in the country, survives as both a proudly maintained mark of local identity and the vehicle for a remarkable regional literature. The present study, after placing the dialect in its historical, geographical and social context, discusses in some detail a selection of previous accounts of its distinctive characteristics of phonology and grammar, showing that its shibboleths have been well recognised, and have remained consistent, over a long period. Passages of recorded speech are then examined, with extensive use of phonetic transcription. Finally, a representative selection of written texts, dating from the eighteenth century to the present and illustrating a wide variety of styles and genres, are presented with detailed annotations. A full glossary is also included. This study clearly demonstrates both the individuality of the dialect and the richness of the local culture of which it is an integral part.

This monograph comprises eight papers, most of which originated as presentations given at international conferences or guest lectures. These papers deal with the problematic nature of English as a global language, and discuss what makes texts authentic and reliable for linguistic analysis, Scots in Ulster and in Scotland, forms and functions of English in Southeast Asia, the spread of rhyming slang, and varieties of ELT. The volume concludes with an annotated bibliography of the most important publications devoted to varieties of English around the world.

This unique collection fills a ten-year gap in studies on the nature of Australian English, and it is the first to deal exclusively with varieties of English on the Australian continent. The book contains chapters on the phonology, morphology, syntax and the lexicon of the dialect, and chapters on variation within the dialect that include Aboriginal and ethnic varieties as well as regional and generational differences with a focus on questions of Australian identity and intercultural relations. With selected contributions by Australia’s leading linguists this volume records the most recent developments in the study of English within Australia.

A synchronic sociolinguistic study of Jamaican Creole (JC) as spoken in urban Kingston, this work uses variationist methods to closely investigate two key concepts of Atlantic Creole studies: the mesolect, and the creole continuum.

One major concern is to describe how linguistic variation patterns with social influences. Is there a linguistic continuum? How does it correlate with social factors? The complex organization of an urbanizing Caribbean society and the highly variable nature of mesolectal speech norms and behavior present a challenge to sociolinguistic variation theory.

The second chief aim is to elucidate the nature of mesolectal grammar. Creole studies have emphasized the structural integrity of basilectal varieties, leaving the status of intermediate mesolectal speech in doubt. How systematic is urban JC grammar? What patterns occur when basilectal creole constructions alternate with acrolectal English elements? Contextual constraints on choice of forms support a picture of the mesolect as a single grammar, variable yet internally-ordered, which has evolved a fine capacity to serve social functions.

Drawing on a year’s fieldwork in a mixed-class neighborhood of the capital city, the author (a speaker of JC) describes the speech community’s history, demographics, and social geography, locating speakers in terms of their social class, occupation, education, age, sex, residence, and urban orientation. The later chapters examine a recorded corpus for linguistic variables that are phono-lexical (palatal glides), phonological (consonant cluster simplification), morphological (past-tense inflection), and syntactic (pre-verbal tense and aspect marking), using quantitative methods of analysis (including Varbrul). The Jamaican urban mesolect is portrayed as a coherent system showing stratified yet regular linguistic behavior, embedded in a well-defined speech community; despite the incorporation of forms and constraints from English, it is quintessentially creole in character.

New Zealand English (NZE) is one of the younger post-colonial varieties of English. It is therefore not surprising that previous research focused on lexical and phonological aspects of NZE and practically neglected grammatical peculiarities. New Zealand English Grammar — Fact or Fiction? presents a careful comparative analysis of parallel corpora of New Zealand, British, American and Australian English in order to single out morphological, syntactic and lexico-grammatical features typical of an emerging New Zealand standard. In addition to corpus data on regional variation, the author uses data on short-term diachronic change within British and American English to show how regional variation is closely related to both stylistic variation (a world-wide colloquialisation of the written norms of English) and ongoing linguistic change leading to temporal regional differences. NZE is different from other national varieties of English in terms of preferences for certain variants rather than categorically different grammatical rules. Nevertheless, it is a standard in its own right in so far as it is a typical mix of variants available in World English. The methodological approach combines both qualitative analyses and statistical evidence. The question in how far statistically significant differences in word frequencies can be shown to be linguistically significant is also relevant for other quantitative research into emerging national standards.

Indian English, or rather, the forms of English used in India, have long been a topic of interest for laymen and scholars. For generations, the ‘exotic’ nature of the transplanted language was commented on, often ridiculed as a matter of unintentional comic. It was only from the 1960s onwards that the local forms of English were recognized for what they are — adaptations of the world language to local needs, and varying to an enormous degree, depending on the speakers’ (and writers’) education and the uses they make of the language. This acknowledgement came mainly from abroad (and still does); Indians are much less willing to admit to the variation and its communicative functions in the country. Therefore, standard English (if possible in its classical British form) is generally favoured, together with formal written uses often based on the stylistic models provided by English literature from Shakespeare to Dickens.

R.R. Mehrotra was one of the first to see the need for a proper sociolinguistic description of the Indian situation, and the forms and functions of English in this complex set-up. He has for a long time collected and analysed the huge range of English around him, with the aim of publishing a collection of texts that reflects the variation within the country along various dimensions, historical, regional, ethnic, social and stylistic.

The present collection of texts is typical in many ways, evoking in the content, style and grammatical forms the contexts in which English functions; notes help to put the excerpts into the proper frame to make them intelligible to outsiders.

Standards and Variation in Urban Speech is an examination and exploration of the aims and methods of sociolinguistic investigation, based on studies of Scottish urban speech. It criticially examines the implications of the notions ‘vernacular’, ‘standard language’, ‘Received Pronunciation’, ‘social class’, and ‘linguistic insecurity’. Through a combination of quantitative and qualitative methods using examples from comedians’ jokes, dialect poetry, formal and informal interviews, and personal narratives, the work illustrates the actual norms that speakers exemplify in various ways.