English World-Wide - Volume 25, Issue 2, 2004

A new survey of variation and change in Canadian English, called Dialect Topography, has been extended from Southern Ontario, where it was conceived and originally implemented, to Montreal. In the tradition of earlier questionnaires investigating Canadian English, the new data contribute to our knowledge of Canadian English at several levels of structure, including phonology, morpho-syntax, and lexicon. In this paper, the Montreal data are compared to those from the Toronto region and to earlier studies of Quebec English, in order to examine differences between the varieties of English spoken in Canada's two largest cities from a diachronic perspective. Contrary to the conclusion of an earlier study, variables involving a contrast between British and American forms show similar frequencies in both cities. The data on these variables also show the frequency of American forms in Montreal speech to be increasing over time. Another set of variables displays wide discrepancies between the two regions. Some of the differences are explained in terms of settlement history and language contact; others are not so easily explained and are presented as a challenge for future research.

Following recent work showing that adolescent peer culture affiliation correlates with phonological variation, our research explores the effect of peer identities and national heritages on the English of Latino students in a New York City high school. Data were gathered in sociolinguistic interviews embedded in a two-year ethnography. The peer groups investigated for Spanish-English contact effects include Hip-Hoppers, Skaters, Geeks, and non-participants in high school peer cultures. Our data show that New York Latino English (NYLE) is distinct from both African American Vernacular English (AAVE) and New York European American Vernacular English (NYEAVE). Here we discuss a previously unexamined variable: the lateral (l). Our most robust research finding is the frequent occurrence of apical /l/ in the L1 Latino English onsets of our sample. This Spanish feature is foreign to NYEAVE and AAVE. Its frequency in L1 NYLE is highest among speakers unaffiliated with the high school peer cultures which promote convergence with NYEAVE and AAVE.

In this day of ever-expanding influence of English it is rare to find a people who are shifting away from the use of English. Such is the case of the speakers of a variety of English spoken in the port town of Gustavia, St. Barthélemy in the French West Indies. The varieties of French and French Creole on St. Barths have been well documented, but there has been only passing mention of the variety of English spoken on the island. While the presence of this English variety in the Caribbean may not seem to be an anomaly, there are interesting questions to investigate regarding its origin and the shift to French. I consider some historical and linguistic evidence that may help to explain the presence of an English variety on this French island. I also investigate the origins of some non-standard English features and whether or not there is evidence of creolization. Finally, I describe some of the sociolinguistic factors relevant to the remaining English speakers in Gustavia and factors involved in their shift from English to French.

The paper discusses some of the syntactic and lexical features of Botswana English. The syntactic features are the tag questionisn't it?and the conversational tagis it?, the exclamationSharp!, the indefinite pronoun phrasethe other one, the dangling modifier, the inversion of auxiliary verb and subject in reported questions, the redundant use of personal / reflexive pronouns, the use of the negative auxiliarydon't,the conflation of the English adjectivesorryand the Setswana adverbialhoo!,the use of the subordinating conjunctionwhichand the modal auxiliarycan be able.The lexical items discussed include Setswana words that have been borrowed and/or translated into English and words such ascondomise,diarise,shameandbrigadewhich have been formed through the processes of derivation and semantic extension. The lexical and syntactic features are those which the researcher has observed, over a six-year period, to be in frequent and widespread use in Botswana.

There are several varieties of English where rhyming slang is or has been a productive source of new words. However, its incidence in some Englishes still remains, by and large,terra incognitafor slang lexicographers and linguists alike. Based on a number of written sources and oral transcripts, this article surveys the origins and development of rhyming slang in Ireland, its most outstanding characteristics and its productivity throughout the 20th century down to the present. In order to illustrate the significance and creative potential of this category of word-formation in Irish English, the final part of the article offers a glossary of Irish rhyming slang, including many terms which are not recorded in the standard slang dictionaries.