English World-Wide - Volume 20, Issue 1, 1999

This essay examines the language of an expatriate community as found in letters and petitions written by African Americans who migrated to Sierra Leone by way of Nova Scotia in 1792. These documents provide some of the earliest first-hand evidence of African American English and contribute to debates about the history of that variety. The paper compares selected grammatical features in that variety to modern-day African Nova Scotian English for insights to the history of African American English and develops a case for the principled use of manuscript documents for reconstructing earlier stages of colloquial English.

With reference to Cameroon English (CamE), this paper proposes another way of analysing non-native English features: differing from the traditional approach which limits itself to surface forms, the paper proposes the tracing of deviations down to the underlying representation (UR) and suggests that RP URs (A) are restructured to autonomous CamE URs (B). While A undergoes RP phonological rules to surface as A', B may fail to undergo these processes; it may also undergo parallel — and quite often divergent — processes and surface as B'. For example, RP UR "s[^]cceed" (A) is restructured to CamE "s[u]cceed" (B). A becomes "s[^]cceed" by Vowel Reduction and B, which does not undergo this process, surfaces unchanged as "s[u]cceed" (B'). This process can be represented on a chart which has three sides: AA', AB and BB'. Hence the name Trilateral Process. It is observed that this model is more illuminating with respect to the dynamics of the differences between native and non-native Englishes than an analysis based solely on surface observation of deviations, for a catalogue of deviations lacks the explanatory insights of a trilateral analysis.

This paper is an update of Luke and Richards' (1982) study on the functions and status of English in Hong Kong. The sociolinguistic matrix is described by outlining the distribution of the main functions of the two written languages standard written Chinese (SWC) and English, and the three spoken languages Cantonese, English and Putonghua, in four key domains: government, media, employment and education. Cantonese and English remain the most important spoken languages. The macro-sociolinguistic analysis "diglossia without bilingual-ism" has given way to polyglossia with increasing bilingualism. There are two written H varieties, SWC and English, the former is penetrating into some domains formerly dominated by the latter. Cantonese, typically interspersed with some English, is assigned L functions in both spoken and written mediums. There is some indication that Putonghua is getting increasingly important in post-colonial Hong Kong, but there are as yet no significant social functions assigned to it. Compared with the early 1980s, significant changes have taken place at all levels. Language-related changes are discussed in light of a critical review of recent local research in a number of areas: medium of instruction, language right, linguistic imperialism, Hong Kong accent, Hong Kong identity and language attitudes toward Chinese and English. In view of the tremendous social prestige and symbolic predominance of English, it is argued that "value-added" is a more suitable epithet than "auxiliary" to characterize the status of English in post-1997 Hong Kong.

In Trudgill's 1983 follow-up of his 1968 urban dialect survey of Norwich, he showed that a labio-dental approximant pronunciation of /r/ which he had formerly dismissed as purely idiosyncratic, was actually early evidence of a sound change. Using this insight, the authors have taken present-day changes in New Zealand English and looked for evidence of them in an archive of recorded English spoken by New Zealanders born between the 1860s and 1890s. In this paper they demonstrate that early examples of present-day changes can be found in the speech of a few New Zealand speakers born as early as the 1860s, showing that some sound changes have their origins much further back than was ever realised. This new evidence raises the interesting question as to why some early variants should later develop into present-day features of New Zealand English and others disappear completely.

T-flapping data from the formal-register Dunedin Survey of NZE are combined with Holmes' analysis of this variable in interview and casual conversational style drawn from the Wellington Corpus of Spoken New Zealand English. My goal was to see how this variable was related to some 15 other previously analysed phonological variables, and to arrive at an overall stylistic portrait of this variable in NZE. The two datasets fit together well, even though Holmes used Varbrul in her analysis while I relied on factor analysis and MANOVA. A number of Holmes' specific hypotheses are supported by the more formal Dunedin data.