English World-Wide - Volume 26, Issue 3, 2005

English as spoken as a second language in India (IE) has developed different sound patterns from other varieties of English. While most descriptions of IE have focused on the English of speakers whose first languages belong to the Indo-Aryan or Dravidian families, in this study, I examine the phonetic and phonological characteristics of the English produced by speakers of three Indian L1s from the Tibeto-Burman language family (Angami, Ao, and Mizo). In addition to describing aspects of Tibeto-Burman Indian English, a previously unreported Indian English variety, I also examine how and why this variety of English differs from General Indian English. The English of Tibeto-Burman L1 speakers seems to form a variety distinct from Indian English, most noticeably in terms of the lack of retroflexion of coronal consonants, the devoicing of word-final obstruents, the simplification of consonant clusters, the presence of post-vocalic [p], and the reduced set of vowel contrasts. Most of these can be traced to transfer from the L1 phonology, with the coda devoicing and cluster reductions reflecting simplification in terms of markedness, following developmental sequences found in second language acquisition.

The paper provides a qualitative real-time study of ancestral language transfer in the English spoken on the Quinault Indian Nation reservation in WA, USA, in the late 1960s and nowadays. The 1960s data come from archival recordings of mainly one bilingual elder, while the recent samples were recorded in 2004. Only the former exhibit some evident phonological and morpho-syntactic transfer. The present-day speech conforms to informal General American patterns, except for one new variable, the glottal replacement of voiceless stops. The latter is not attested in the archival material and is argued to involve an innovation. A similar phenomenon has been reported in several other American Indian English (AIE) varieties. This may imply that a shared AIE substratum is developing, based on non-standard English features rather than on specific ancestral language transfer features. Leap’s (1993) assertion that no general AIE variety is on the rise may be worth re-examination.

We inquire into Definite Article Reduction (DAR), a phenomenon known to characterize northern English dialects. For this research we collected data from speakers at the North Yorkshire/Lancashire border. While previous studies have largely addressed DAR from a phonological perspective, we examine whether DAR is conditioned by other linguistic factors. The pattern we identify is that speakers show DAR most frequently when they refer to something (i) that is in their immediate environment (situational reference), (ii) that was just mentioned in the conversation (anaphoric reference), or (iii) that is known to the hearer (shared knowledge). We note that these uses correspond to the pragmatic category of “givenness/familiarity”, and may also be associated with the notions “near/close”. We speculate on the emergence of DAR in the North of England, drawing on evidence from the historical record regarding the development of the definite article from the demonstrative paradigm and the contact situation with Scandinavian.