English World-Wide - Volume 25, Issue 1, 2004

In Australian English, tall poppies are usually individuals who, on the basis of unwarranted self-adulation, itself a consequence of success, amassed fortune or fame, have become targets for criticism; or, less frequently, individuals who, overcome by success, amassed fortune or fame, and on the mistaken assumption that they are above the law, have engaged in unlawful behaviour, only to find that, eventually, the law catches up with them as well. They become the victims of a widespread tendency, known as the tall poppy syndrome, to scrutinize high achievers and cut down the tall poppies among them. Sometimes, especially in the world of science, the term tall poppy is also used to refer to outstanding scholars who deserve to be publicly acknowledged for their work. This paper looks at tall poppies and at the tall poppy syndrome in Australian discourse, and argues that the term tall poppy is a key word which, when studied closely in terms of its currency, its incidence in collocations, etc., reveals a great deal about the real nature of egalitarianism, one of Australia’s most often named cultural values.

Recent studies of bi-ethnic enclave dialect communities in the American South suggest that earlier versions of African American speech both accommodated local dialect norms and exhibited a persistent substratal effect from the early African-European contact situation. We examine this hypothesis by considering the sociolinguistic situation in Texana, North Carolina, a small African American community in the Smoky Mountain region of Appalachia. Though its population is only about 150 residents, it is the largest African American community in the Smoky Mountains. This study considers diagnostic sociolinguistic variables for Texana residents in order to examine the extent to which the members of this African American community align their speech with local dialect norms as the basis for evaluating the status of earlier and contemporary African American English (AAE) in Appalachia. Morphosyntactic variables examined are 3rd pl. -s attachment, 3rd sg. -s absence, copula absence, and past tense be leveling; phonological variables include rhoticity, syllable coda consonant cluster reduction, and /ai/ glide weakening. When compared to cohort white Appalachian speakers, data from older Texana residents confirm the regional accommodation of earlier AAE and at the same time point toward substrate influence in the historical development of AAE. However, unlike AAE in other enclave regional contexts, we find that the dialect of younger residents is not moving toward a supraregional norm of AAE. Instead, young speakers are accommodating several key features of Southern American English, specifically the Southern Appalachian English (AppE) variety that is characteristic of the Smoky Mountain region of North Carolina. Explanations for the attested diachronic changes as well as future trajectories of change for Texana speakers must appeal to sociopsychological factors such as regional identity and orientation to explain local community language norms.

It has been suggested that use of the Northern Subject Rule (NSR) in Southern Irish English (SIrE) is the result of diffusion from Ulster-Scots dialects of the North of Ireland, where many Scots settled in the 17th century. 19th-century Irish-Australian emigrant letters show the main NSR constraint — which permits plural verbal -s with noun phrase subjects but prohibits it with an adjacent third plural pronoun — to have been as robust in varieties of SIrE as it was in Northern Irish English (NIrE) of the same period. Before British colonisation of Ireland, the NSR was present in dialects of Northern England and the North Midlands, regions which contributed substantially to English settlement in the South of Ireland. It is therefore suggested here that the NSR in SIrE might be a retention of a vernacular feature of NSR dialects that were taken to Ireland from the English North and North Midlands rather than a feature that diffused southwards in Ireland after 1600.

This paper addresses the issue of the distribution in English-based pidgins and creoles of a number of selected diagnostic features. A large corpus of 17 Atlantic and eight Pacific varieties is surveyed in search of attestations. Examples are listed to illustrate the occurrence of features in the pidgins and creoles considered. Citations include the first attestation of a feature in the earliest records currently available of both Atlantic and Pacific English-lexicon contact languages. The textual evidence adduced appears to indicate that 23 diagnostic features considered to be Atlantic or Pacific respectively have a wider distribution than hitherto assumed and should therefore be reclassified as world-wide features. Also discussed are some of the implications of these findings.

Discussions of World Englishes mainly concentrate on the particularities of individual varieties of English spoken in the different parts of the world. There is, however, another form of World English which emerges when speakers of different international varieties interact with each other. When English is the mother tongue of neither of the speakers who use the language for communicative purposes, they employ it as a lingua franca. This paper describes the syntactic variation found in this variety of English. It presents the results of analyses of a corpus containing 22 hours of naturally occurring interactions and describes both unsystematic as well as (seemingly) systematic grammatical choices made by the speakers. The results reveal that, not unlike the processes which have previously been documented for dialect contact, interactions across international Englishes are characterised by processes of levelling and regularisation, whilst at the same time individual speakers retain the characteristics of their original varieties. Individual Englishes are further constrained by transfer processes and interlanguage patterns.