English World-Wide - Volume 18, Issue 1, 1997

The concept of linguistic nationalism is first recorded for England in the 16th century, when the dominance of English had to be re-established in fields like the law, science and administration. In the centuries that followed, statements underlining the link between national language and nation are few — even on the Celtic fringe. It was the American Revolution which gave birth to a new centre of anglophones proud of their independent standards; a similar development but with increasingly weaker results has affected Australia, New Zealand, Canada and South Africa. Second-language countries like India are trailing even further behind, not to mention the problems of creole communities like those in the Caribbean, West Africa or the Southwest Pacific. My paper looks at these communities for evidence of a correlation between linguistic and political independence, standardization and prestige associated with use of the vernacular, and discusses problems connected with the development of alternatives like the standardization of an indigenous language to serve as a badge of national prestige, and as an expression of democratic intentions.

Although dialectology was among the first disciplines to use the survey as a research tool, dialectologists, unlike researchers in other social sciences, have done little work in assessing the effects of their survey methods on their results. This paper attempts to begin a dialog on the effects of methods on results in dialectology by comparing results from five surveys which overlap both in their geographic coverage and in some of the linguistic information they elicit. The surveys differ in their methods of administration (face-to-face interviews vs. telephone interviews), sample construction (purposive vs. random), and the kinds of data they elicit (observations of behavior vs. self-reports). Our comparison of the different surveys shows that while different modes of administration have little effect on results, even slight differences in survey populations affect results significantly, as does the kind of data elicited. Surprisingly, self-reports seem to reflect the linguistic behavior of a population for some features better than observations of behavior do. The effects of the type of sample used are not clear from this study, although random samples have the advantage of explicitly accounting for sampling error and allow for a wide range of inferential statistics that cannot be used with purposive samples. Finally, the comparison suggests that there is no single 'best' type of survey. Different research problems require different kinds of surveys. What is important is that samples not be constructed in haphazard ways and that we explicitly take into account the effects of our methods on our results.

Mauritius was a British colony for almost 200 years, but except in the domains of administration and teaching, the English language was never really spoken on the island. This article traces its local history and its failure to establish itself as a replacement for French (and perhaps also the French-based creole) during the 19th and the first half of the 20th century. English is still the official language of Mauritius, but a large proportion of the population does not speak it at all or has at best a very limited knowledge of it. Nonetheless, no other language spoken on the island presents itself as a viable alternative. The historical overview and the discussion of the present situation are complemented by an analysis of the language tables taken from the population censuses of 1931 to 1990 and some data from an inquiry made by the author in the mid-seventies. To complete the study, the English influence on French and Creole is shown, and three specimens of Mauritian English as spoken by young people are given and commented on.

The New Varieties of English (e.g. IndE, SingE, NigE) have been studied for the last several decades. In the course of this study several 'myths' have arisen about these varieties and these myths have increasingly been accepted as facts. The main aim of this paper is to examine some of these myths and to try to reveal the realities behind them. I argue that as long as the myths are accepted as givens there can be no real progress in the study of the New Varieties. I will explore the myths in the context of IndE but the arguments provided apply to all the New Varieties. The myths I will deal with are:1) IndE is a "non-native" variety of English.2) IndE has no standards.3) IndE lacks creativity.4) IndE is the language of a small but dominant elite.5) English is the cause of most of the problems in India and in the world.

Social dialect data demonstrates that women tend to lead linguistic change in New Zealand English over a range of linguistic variables. This paper describes some current sound changes in New Zealand English, discusses their potential sources, and suggests possible mechanisms by which they percolate through the system. Women's role in language change is a controversial area. The final section examines a range of explanations which have been proposed to account for the patterns identified by researchers and assesses their relevance to the New Zealand data.