English World-Wide - Volume 29, Issue 1, 2008

We (wey, whey, way) as relativizer occurs in the English-lexifier creoles on both sides of the Atlantic, and has been assumed to originate in English what (e.g. by Cassidy and Le Page 1967: 459). Instances of this word as a relativizer in English, however, date only from the beginning of the 19th century — too late by over a century to have provided the widespread creole form. This essay examines alternative possibilities for its origin, and concludes that it must be sought in Scottish and/or northern English who. Determining its ultimate origin may shed light upon the age and development of these particular languages.

Globalization has been defined as the process whereby “events happening in one place … impact upon many other places, often remote in time and space” (Urry 2003: 39). This paper examines the impact of two globally available linguistic resources — the quotatives be like and go — in two spatially discontinuous localities. The investigation of the local processes that are involved in the adoption and negotiation of these global newcomers provides a holistic as well as a particularized view on the sociolinguistic mechanisms of globalization. I will demonstrate that by way of creatively adapting linguistic innovations, speakers can participate in global trends, yet do so in a highly localized and idiosyncratic manner. A micro-linguistic analysis of the emerging local practises allows us to situate localized linguistic processes into a “wider picture of structural becoming” (Blommaert 2003: 613), and provides one step forward towards our understanding of the development and/or maintenance of social spatiality.

This paper uses a multivariate analysis of 19th-century letters by semi-literate African American settlers in Liberia to investigate the frequency and distribution of the present perfect (PP) in earlier African American English (AAE). Despite descriptions elsewhere of the PP as marginal to AAE, it occurs here with great frequency, a finding attributed to the sensitivity of the form to genre differences. The linguistic factors conditioning choice between the PP and the preterite match those described for other varieties of English of that time period. This suggests that an English-like PP was part of the core grammar of the writers of these letters.

The Ebonics controversy revealed surprising public rejection of the ideas of academic linguists. The intellectual history of the situation provides a reasonable explanation. Linguists lack consensus themselves, while the public consensus includes inherent contradictions. Academic and public ideas of language came into conflict over Ebonics in part because linguists attempted to impose their own ideas on the public, in part because of confusion over terminology, and in part because the situation was entangled in social politics. The lessons of the affair suggest an approach to language and public policy in which linguists come to terms with public views of language.