What do We Really Know About Kenyan English?: A Pilot Study in Research Methodology

Despite the growing interest in the New Englishes, systematic research into the features of many of these varieties is still lacking. This paper looks at the work that has been done on the features of Kenyan English. It attempts to show that only a combination of corpus analyses, elicitation tests, and the introspection of target language speakers yields reliable results that come up to the expectations of modern linguistics. A re-examination of some of the features listed in the relevant studies by means of these three methods suggests that part of what has been written about Kenyan English may be a misrepresentation of the linguistic reality.