English World-Wide - Volume 21, Issue 1, 2000

Rhyming slang (RS) sprang to life in mid-19th century London when it was first recorded by Ducange Anglicus (1857) together with other unusual forms of slang, such as back slang and Polari. In the period of extensive British emigration to the United States, Canada, South Africa, Australia and New Zealand, this special type of lexis was also carried around the world — though in much less regular distribution than might have been expected on the basis of shared socioeconomic colonial histories. Three types of development were possible:1. individual RS items might survive (and possibly acquire new meanings);2. they might die out, leaving a historical record of their extraterritorial existence at best;3. they might prompt local fashions, imitating the pattern but creating new words.The phenomenon of RS has found various references in books on national Englishes (such as those by Baker (1970), but significantlyless so in Ramson (1966) and Mencken (1977)); however, it has never been explored on a contrastive level. Such an approach hasbecome more feasible today now that the set of historical dictionaries of English is complete following the publication of the worksedited by Silva (1996), Ramson (1988) and Orsman (1997) — even though slang is badly documented, since it was notalways considered worthy of inclusion in general dictionaries.

Irish-English (IrE) as a contact vernacular permits tense, mood and aspect categories to be marked in a manner whichdistinguishes this variety from all other world Englishes. Researchers, however, have been preoccupied with its distinctive tense andaspect markers and much less is known about the manner in which IrE modal relations are expressed. This paper attempts to redressthe imbalance by comparing aspects of modality in IrE and other English varieties and by introducing a morphosyntactic syntagmtermed “modal be+to” which can be used to express both deontic and epistemic modality. The marker isfrequent in Northern Irish Englishes and a detailed account of its use in the South Armagh vernacular is offered here. In addition,attention will be given to locating the potential sources of be+to as the product of a language contactsituation.

This paper presents some of the findings of a new experimental study based on Cruttenden’s model of intonation andusing O’Connor and Arnold’s pedagogical materials. The study was designed to examine chiefly the form andfrequency of intonation patterns among educated Nigerian speakers of English, not the communicative value of these patterns. Thegeneral conclusion is that certain patterns having a high frequency constitute a system in Nigerian usage, differing in importantrespects from native-speaker systems, though lacking stability.

This paper describes and analyses the phenomenon of consonant cluster simplification in the English of two native Cantonesespeakers in Hong Kong. We show that this process is systematic in that it targets the alveolar plosives and removes them when theyare members of a coda consonant cluster in spite of the fact that the details of the simplification may vary from subject to subject.We compare this process to a seemingly similar cluster simplification in native varieties of English and show that they differ in twokey respects. Our study provides evidence of a systematic morphophonemic alternation in the English of L1 Cantonese speakers,confirming the observation in a number of sociolinguistic studies that this process is a linguistic feature of the English of L1Cantonese speakers.

Colonial Englishes have been observed to contain both archaic and innovative linguistic features, and are thus seen to displayevidence of both language preservation and change. This paper examines the use of certain phonological features of New ZealandEnglish (NZE) and discusses their status as relics or innovations. Examination is made of the diphthong which occurs in the mouthlexical set and the front short vowels trap, dress and kit. Trends in usage are studied using real time analysis of speakers recordedin the 1940s and their present day descendants recorded in 1993/94. In this way, the development of NZE is charted by means ofthe analysis of different generations of the same New Zealand families.