English World-Wide - Volume 20, Issue 2, 1999

This study examines the development of a Native American Indian variety of English in the context of a rural community in the American South where European Americans, African Americans and Native American Indians have lived together for a couple of centuries now. The Lumbee Native American Indians, the largest Native American group east of the Mississippi River and the largest group in the United States without reservation land, lost their ancestral language relatively early in their contact with outside groups, but they have carved out a unique English dialect niche which now distinguishes them from cohort European American and African American vernaculars. Processes of selective accommodation, differential language change and language innovation have operated to develop this distinct ethnic variety, while their cultural isolation and sense of "otherness" in a bi-polar racial setting have served to maintain its ethnic marking.

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.

The paper discusses some general properties of slang and presents a selection of slang expressions as used by students from the University of Benin, Nigeria. The terms collected are interpreted in the light of word formation patterns, semantic changes, and other categories.

This paper contends that an English-based contact language developed on the Bonin (Ogasawara) Islands in the 19th century and was used as the language of communication among the settlers there. The factors discussed in support of this contention are: (1) the diversity in the languages of the first-generation settlers, (2) the abundance of mixed-language households, (3) the absence of formal education or literacy, (4) the nature of words reported by Japanese seamen shipwrecked on the island, (5) reports of communication in English between islanders and visitors, (6) the off-island experiences of islanders, (7) written references to a contact language, (8) the continued usage of non-English words, and (9) the linguistic outcomes of similar island communities.

In this paper it is argued that the New Zealand English accent is a mixed accent in origin, showing input from many areas in England south of a line from Cheshire to the Wash. It is argued that attributing the accent to more specific areas in England is possible only if some of the phonetic evidence is ignored. Accordingly, the notion of swamping (Lass 1990) is not specifically required to explain most of the features of the New Zealand accent: such south-eastern focus as there may be is largely the result of the failure of specifically south-eastern features to become stigmatised.