English World-Wide - Volume 19, Issue 1, 1998

Work on Northern Hiberno-English (NHE) generally accepts a consensus view that plays down or overlooks interactions between ethnic division and language variation. A study of Derry/Londonderry English (DLE) indicates that, for a feature involved in ongoing change, ethnicity is a salient social factor. The (e) variable in the FACE-class is subject to change in which a distinction between "Standard" NHE [e] and vernacular [I] is giving way to a three-way distinction which for some speakers adds ingliding [is] diphthongs. The change originates in the east of Northern Ireland, especially Belfast, and may have been in progress for some time. It is entering DLE through the Protestant middle class, and diphthongs are now the predominant vernacular form among Protestant teenagers of both sexes and all class backgrounds. While it has made little progress among Catholics, it is currently found mainly among the Catholic middle class. The ethnic boundary is not an impermeable barrier, but it has a considerable delaying effect on the spread of this innovation.

The article reports on research carried out at an army camp in the Eastern Cape Province of South Africa in 1996; it aimed to examine language use at the camp across all levels and in all contexts, in order to assess the degree to which South Africa's new multilingual language policy of 1994 has taken root, and in particular to ascertain the extent to which English was being used, and what troops and staff felt about its use. Questionnaires, interviews and observation techniques were used to provide a full description of linguistic practices, views and attitudes at all levels and in a wide range of activities in the camp. Results suggest that despite the national language policy, and despite a very low number of L1 English speakers in the camp, English is playing a very significant role across all levels as lingua franca for efficient communication, and this is matched with a pervasively positive view about its continued use.

New Zealand English has evolved in the past 150 years, at a time when it is possible to find both written and spoken evidence of its development. This paper takes evidence gained from an analysis of written comments on early New Zealand English and compares this with data taken from ananalysis of spoken New Zealand English obtained from recordings collected in the 1940s of old New Zealanders born in the 1850s-1890s — the period when the New Zealand accent was developing. By putting the written data beside the spoken data it is now possible to assess the accuracy of written records as a basis for the reconstruction of the earliest form of New Zealand English.

The status of the subjunctive is examined in this Australian study of its manifestations in subordinate clauses: in mandative constructions as well as those expressing purpose, condition, concession and the counterfactual. Data from the Australian ACE corpus (1986) is compared with (a) those from the American Brown corpus and the British LOB corpus (both 1961); and with (b) findings from an Australian elicitation survey of 1993. Both the diachronic corpus comparisons and the sociolinguistic profiles associated with the survey indicate declining use of the subjunctive in adverbial clauses, most notably the counterfactual type, but also those expressing purpose, concession and ordinary conditions. However the use of mandative subjunctives is stable, written into a range of corpus materials (fiction and non-fiction), and endorsed by Australians across the age range. The resilience of the mandative subjunctive in Australian (and American) usage contrasts with the prevailing view of British usage commentators, that the subjunctive, if not obsolescent, should not be preserved.

Recent descriptions of literacy in the English-lexified pidgins and Creoles of Melanesia and Australia have described it as being imposed by outsiders, irrelevant to speakers of these languages and unsuitable for use in formal education. This article presents an opposing point of view. First it outlines recent developments in the region, showing that while literacy may have been introduced from the outside, it has been embraced by many pidgin and creole speakers and used for their own purposes, including education. Second, it describes research findings refuting claims that using a pidgin or creole as a language of education will cause confusion among students and interfere with their acquisition of English.