English World-Wide - Volume 32, Issue 1, 2011

This study examines crossing (Bucholtz 1999; Cutler 1999; Rampton 1995) in Korean hip hop Blinglish as a case study of globalization of African American Vernacular English (AAVE) in popular culture. Blinglish in Korean hip hop can be understood as a prime example of “English from below” (Preisler 1999) to informally express subcultural identity and style. The findings of the study suggest that AAVE features appear at different linguistic levels including lexis, phonology, and morpho-syntax in Korean hip hop Blinglish but do not demonstrate the same degree of AAVE penetration, with a frequency-related hierarchy emerging among these linguistic components. The area of Korean hip hop Blinglish with the heaviest crossing influence from AAVE is found to be lexis followed by phonology. The presence of AAVE syntactic features is somewhat restricted in type and occurrence, indicating that the verbal markers in AAVE are considerably varied and intricate, and syntactic elements are not as easily crossed by non-AAVE speakers as lexical items.

In this paper a partly novel combination of auditory transformation and vowel-extrinsic normalisation is applied to acoustic vowel data from six Edinburgh middle-class speakers. It is shown that the vowel plots thus produced correspond rather well to articulatory and impressionistic descriptions found in the literature. Furthermore, the relatively small variability found between the speakers in a number of vowel features suggests that a typical middle-class Edinburgh vowel space does exist. However, it is also shown that in acoustic terms this vowel space is organised even less symmetrically than is generally assumed.

This paper contributes to a small, but quickly growing body of literature that looks at orthographic variation as a semiotic resource with which social stances and relations are expressed and created. First, we analyze a corpus of blog and email writing from Jamaica and its diaspora — two settings in which both Jamaican Creole (JC) and a local standard of English are in use. Here, spelling is studied quantitatively as an expression of community-level attitudes toward JC in different settings. In a second step we draw on findings from a survey on attitudes toward language varieties and spelling variation among writers of Creole and English, contextualizing the quantitative analysis. Our findings indicate that diasporic writers make use of nonstandard spellings in a way that marks those lexical items as non-English (thus: as Creole) that are part of the historically shared lexicon of JC and English but whose meanings and functions have come to differ in the two varieties. By contrast, writers living in Jamaica prefer using spelling choices to mark codeswitches between English and Creole, and thus to construct symbolic distance between the codes. A comparison between genders shows women to make a more systematic use of nonstandard spellings according to linguistic constraints than men do.

The varieties of English in the United States’ Appalachian region have undergone changes throughout the 20th century. This paper examines a change to one of the more stereotyped of vernacular dialect features, the use of them in a demonstrative determiner construction: them apples are the best. Although this dialect feature is found in English varieties around the world, this study is the first to take up a quantitative assessment of it as a sociolinguistic variable. In this paper, we discuss the historical background for demonstrative them, its current distribution in a corpus of modern Appalachian speech, and its relations to the other modern plural demonstratives, these and those. The data reveal that them functions primarily as an alternate to those, but the use of demonstrative them is sharply in decline across apparent time. As a stereotype of Appalachian speech, demonstrative them still remains, but younger Appalachian speakers have largely abandoned this stigmatized form.