English World-Wide - Volume 22, Issue 2, 2001

This article analyzes the earliest known attestations of 302 lexical, functional, and grammatical features in 13 English-lexicon contact languages in the Atlantic and the Pacific. The main aims are (i) to shed light on the historical relationships between the individual varieties, (ii) to learn about the mechanisms at work in their genesis and development, and (iii) to examine the significance of features common to both geographical regions. Overall, our intention is to demonstrate that a statistical feature-based approach as proposed here can yield valuable insights into the development and interrelationships between Pidgins and Creoles.

The vocabulary of Fiji English is one of its most distinguishing features. English has a profound influence upon the lives of all Fiji Islanders — it is the principal language of government, the judiciary, education and commerce. This paper examines some of the sources and features of the Fiji English lexis, the most common of which include: borrowings, reborrowings, calques, new coinages, semantic shifts, archaisms, and hybrid compounds. It also outlines some of the lexical affinities with and divergences from other varieties of English.

This article reports the findings of an investigation into the roles of English and Chinese in the workplace in post-1997 Hong Kong. The findings are derived from a questionnaire survey of 1 475 professionals, focus-group interviews and case studies. The study found that English continues to function as the unmarked language of internal and external written communication in both the public and private sectors. Chinese professionals who work for foreign-owned organisations in Hong Kong apparently make greater use of English in written communication than their counterparts in Hong Kong-owned companies, while professionals who work for large Hong Kong concerns read or write in English slightly more than those who work for small local companies. Cantonese is the unmarked language of intra-ethnic spoken communication, particularly in informal situations, while English is generally restricted to situations where expatriates are present.

The /o/ vowel in the English of Bradford is produced by many speakers as a monophthong with a clearly fronted or central quality. Description of such a pronunciation is, however, all but absent from the literature, suggesting that such pronunciations are a relatively recent development in Bradford speech. The acoustic characteristics of 337 tokens of /o/ are investigated, with a view to matching acoustic cues to the auditory impression of fronting. The findings are assessed with respect to similar fronting patterns in the vowel systems of varieties of English elsewhere in the UK and worldwide, and to the principles of sound change elucidated by Labov (1991, 1994). We conclude that “internal” factors alone are inadequate to explain the current tendency for varieties of English in northern England to feature /o/ fronting, and suggest that the appearance of this variant in Bradford English is the consequence of contact-induced spread.