English World-Wide - Volume 29, Issue 2, 2008

This paper looks at language choice and use in South African SMS communication (texting) among bilingual (isiXhosa / English-speaking) users. Although English is the preferred language for most of the 22 participants (aged between 18 and 27), SMSes also create a forum for isiXhosa literacy (either in isiXhosa messages or in mixed English-isiXhosa messages). The English-language SMSes produced by these bilingual speakers share many of the features which have been reported for English SMS communication internationally (abbreviations, paralinguistic restitutions, non-standard spellings), and provide evidence for what one might call a global English SMS standard. At the same time, however, their SMSes also contain local linguistic features and, in particular, local, cultural content. The isiXhosa messages differ markedly from the writers’ English-language messages in that they contain no abbreviated material, non-standard spellings or paralinguistic restitutions and thus violate the sociolinguistic maxims of SMS / texting as postulated by Thurlow (2003). These bilingual writers thus communicate in the electronic medium using two different languages as well as two, non-overlapping sets of sociolinguistic norms.

This paper provides a detailed description of the pronunciation of English by fifteen fourth-year undergraduates at the Hong Kong Institute of Education. First, the occurrence of American features of pronunciation is considered. Then there is an analysis of the pronunciation of initial TH, initial and final consonant clusters, L-vocalisation, conflation between initial [n] and [l], monophthong vowels, the vowels in FACE and GOAT, vowel reduction, rhythm and sentence stress. Finally, the status of Hong Kong English is considered, particularly the extent of its continuing alignment with an exonormative standard.

The New Zealand (NZ) short front vowels are often considered as a defining feature of New Zealand English (NZE), yet research which has considered data from both the Pakeha (NZ European) and the NZ Maori communities has noted slightly different patterns in the realisations of the vowel in the KIT lexical set in the respective communities (Bell 1997a, b; Warren and Bauer 2004). This paper compares the short front vowel series of NZ Maori students with that of NZ Samoan, Tongan, Cook Island and Niuean students and demonstrates how the NZ short front vowel series mark both similarity and difference across NZ communities. Our findings show that NZ Maori students have a greater degree of centralisation in their KIT vowel and a greater degree of raising of their DRESS and TRAP vowels than their NZ Pasifika counterparts. However, the manner in which the vowels raise and centralise distinguishes NZ Maori and Cook Island students from their NZ Samoan, Tongan and Niuean cohorts. The latter observation highlights problems with the pan-ethnic “Pasifika” label used to distinguish NZ Maori from other NZ Polynesian communities.

This study investigated acoustic-phonetic characteristics of English vowels (four monophthongs /I æ ~ %/ and two diphthongs /eI o~/) spoken by native speakers of Australian English (AusE, n = 6) and Thai (T, n = 15). The Thai speakers had lived in Australia for an average of 3.2 years. While the Thai speakers did not differ significantly from the AusE speakers in their vowel quality for monophthongs, they were more dissimilar in their production of diphthongs. Specifically, the Thai speakers produced English diphthongs with less formant movement, a phenomenon widely reported for speakers of various other Southeast Asian languages. Differences between the Thai and AusE groups reached statistical significance for the female speakers. As for temporal characteristics, the Thai speakers produced significantly shorter monophthongs, but not diphthongs, than did AusE speakers. As a result, the ratio of monophthongs to diphthongs was much smaller for the Thai (0.53) than for the AusE group (0.72). It appeared that the Thai speakers equated the English diphthongs /eI/ and /o~/ with the long vowels /e˜/ and /o˜/, respectively, in their first language (L1) Thai. Further, their production of the diphthongs may be related to a large number of diphthongs in the Thai vowel inventory, which may encourage its speakers to substitute existing L1 categories for English diphthongs rather than forming authentic, new phonetic categories.