English World-Wide - Volume 17, Issue 2, 1996

Varieties of English defined by users (as dialects, sociolects and chronolects) andby uses (according to medium, formality, text type, etc.) have been the object ofdescription in various places, and have of course functioned conspicuously in thisjournal which has the topic as part of its title. By contrast, the questions of whatcan be considered English, and how its outer boundaries are defined, have beenasked less frequently, and not in any comprehensive way. (In EWW I havefollowed a pragmatic editorial course in admitting varieties which have somelinguistic relationship with English and are in a contact situation/coexistence withEnglish in the speech community discussed.) My paper looks at a few 'problemcases' among utterances, in particular at various forms of broken English andlinguistic experiments, at language mix and code-switching and then turns tolinguistic systems, with semi-languages, pidgins, creoles, cants and mixed languagessingled out for detailed discussion. A classification of the varieties treatedobviously depends on the degree of their divergence from English, their functionalrange and standardization, users' attitudes and the ways how the language isacquired — four factors which can have different weight for the classification inthe individual case.

There is no doubt that glottalisation of syllable-final stops in Received Pronunciation is on the increase, but this has sometimes been taken to imply that the feature has mushroomed as a late 20th-century phenomenon. This paper sets out to show that glottalisation is actually of some antiquity. Explicit references (by reputable linguists) to glottalisation in the standard language date from the early 1920s, while audio recordings going back even further provide us with direct proof. If apparent time is taken into account, such data could indicate that glottalisation was quite common from at least the mid-19th century onwards.

Vocabulary varies in more than just the single dimension of the list of words that appears in typical desk-size dictionaries. Attention to the multidimensional nature of lexical variation can contribute in important ways to our understanding of language, and more particularly to the situation of a language in its particular culture. The vocabulary of AmE has less to do with supposedly authoritative wordlists than it does with the the cultural, historical, regional, and social life of the country, and this can be illustrated from specialized dictionaries. A special focus of this essay is quantitative analysis. The features of a language may be con-sidered in terms of either magnitude or frequency, and such treatment has the potential to inform our understanding not only of a particular language, but of the workings of language taken more generally. Lexical variation is pervasive and normal: we should observe the interactions of the qualitative, quantitative, and structural dimensions of a language that promote the variation, and we should think differently about what a language is and how it works if we are to account for such behavior by words.

This article analyses a Jamaican cultural event, "Dance Hall", as a speech event. It then focusses on a particular controversy surrounding the lyrics of a piece of dance hall music performed by Buju Banton. It argues that much of the discussion about the lyrics in Britain and the USA dealt with these lyrics outside the sociolinguistic context of the Jamaican dance hall within which Buju Banton's recorded performance would be understood by many Jamaicans to belong. The article further argues that the international misunderstanding is compounded by the fact that Jamaicans as a group refuse to recognise Jamaican, the language of the lyrics, as a language separate and apart from English. The conclusion is that if this were to happen, it would be easier to present Jamaican cultural output to the international community in a manner which forces that community to understand and respect the linguistic and sociocultural autonomy of such output. Since Jamaican (i.e. Jamaican Creole) is the language of dance hall performances, the article was written in Jamaican and an English translation provided. There is a brief discussion of the process by which a sociolinguistic academic article was conceived of and written in Jamaican, traditionally a language of oral informal discourse.