English World-Wide - Volume 22, Issue 1, 2001

In this article, the past tense system of the verb to be in modern informal spoken British English is investigated. Variation is endemic, but an in-depth investigation across individual dialect areas shows that three generalization strategies can be distinguished. Of these, two lead to a straightforward simplification of the system (was-generalization and were-generalization respectively), whereas the dominant mixed type has remorphologized the Standard English (StE) number distinction and replaced it by a distinction according to polarity. A cognitive explanation is advanced for the pervasiveness of this at first glance rather complicated system.

A list of vocabulary items peculiar to English in Ghana has been compiled over the last ten years. Included are items that have appeared in print at least three times within eight years. Most items were tested on Ghanaians of varying ages, ethnic backgrounds and levels of education to ascertain familiarity and usage. The paper is based on the above data. It classifies the entries according to (1) origin: English, local, hybrid; and (2) semantic and formal subcategorisations, i.e. (i) which semantic and formal processes the English items have undergone, (ii) from which semantic domains the local items are drawn and (iii) by which processes the hybrids were created.

In addition to the major English varieties spoken in New Zealand, Australia and South Africa, the dialect of the Falkland Islands is one of the few native-speaker Englishes in the southern hemisphere. The Falkland variety is relatively unknown in the rest of the English-speaking world and when heard it is often wrongly identified as one of the other southern hemisphere varieties. This article considers whether the Falkland variety is linguistically typical of southern hemisphere Englishes. A description of Falkland Islands English is given, based on a large corpus of conversational data, and direct comparisons are drawn between the Falkland dialect and the three main southern hemisphere varieties. Although many similarities between these Englishes do exist, the Falkland dialect is shown to diverge for several of the diagnostic southern hemisphere variables. Explanations for this are suggested, using the notions of identity and default.

This paper presents the findings of a study of vague language use based on a corpus of naturally-occurring conversations between native and non-native speakers of English in Hong Kong. The specific concern of the paper is to describe the use of vague language by the two sets of speakers. The forms of vague language present in our data are defined and exemplified. Both the native English and the non-native speakers use vague language extensively in our data for a similar range of purposes, for example to achieve informal communication, classify objects, fill a lexical or knowledge gap, and accommodate one another. We also investigated whether communication problems are experienced in these intercultural conversations by speakers using vague language differently. We conclude that in our data at least there is no evidence to suggest that such communication problems arise from differences in vague language use. On the contrary, the use of vague language by both native and non-native speakers facilitates rather than hinders successful communication in intercultural conversations.

This paper explores changes in the use of generic pronouns in Australian English. We examine a database of public non-scripted speech to establish to what extent generic pronouns promoted through non-sexist language reform have become part of public speech. The results show that the use of masculine generic he has decreased substantially mainly in favour of singular they. The pronoun he or she does not appear to have been adopted widely by people speaking in a public context.