English World-Wide - Volume 32, Issue 2, 2011

This paper deals with the issue of genetic relationships between English-based Atlantic creoles. A method borrowed from biology will be applied to a set of lexical and structural features found in the sample presented in Hancock (1987) in order to assess the degrees of affinity between these languages and their evolutionary histories. We will argue that the phylogenetic networks approach proposed here is the most suitable for the classification of creole languages. At the same time, we will show that this tool can also be used to assess the degree of radicalness of a creole, another issue which has been at the heart of creole studies.

While acoustic phonetic studies have been carried out on all types of Englishes around the world, the second language variety spoken in Kenya has so far not been investigated acoustically. The present paper closes this gap by presenting an acoustic phonetic analysis of acrolectal Kenyan English. The data presented here consist of nine male speakers of acrolectal Kenyan English reading the “The North Wind and the Sun”-passage and were analysed using PRAAT (Boersma 2001; Boersma and Weenink 2008). As I will show, a careful visual and statistical analysis of the data unearthes several features of the Kenyan English vowel system that so far have gone unnoticed (e.g. a trend towards a seven vowel system with two front and two back mid vowels). Furthermore I will argue that some of these features can be traced back to the local L1 feature pool.

This article presents both quantitative and qualitative information on the orthography, lexis, and morphosyntax of Bahamian Standard English. Employing a press corpus of over 100 000 words, it aims not only at a descriptive account but also at initial answers to two research questions. First, is Standard English as spoken in the Bahamas still following the traditional British norm or has it shifted toward an American orientation; and second, what role does the local creole play in shaping the variety? An overview of the current sociolinguistic situation obtaining in the Bahamas complements the analysis.

In recent years, the UK has experienced unparalleled numbers of migrants from Eastern Europe, particularly Poland. Many migrants came with their families. We examined variation in the English spoken by adolescent Polish migrants in Edinburgh and London. We asked: to what extent are teenage Polish migrants acquiring the patterns of variation typical of their local peer group? We compare the results for the well-known variable (ing) in the speech of both Polish migrants and their same age British peers. Our results indicate that the Polish teenagers seem to be sensitive to the overall rates of the non-standard variant in the city they have moved to. Moreover, Polish teenagers also replicate some of the linguistic and social constraints found in the speech of the locally-born teens. In some cases, they partially replicate the constraint patterns found in the locally-born teenagers, and in other cases they introduce novel constraints unattested in the speech of their locally-born peers. The results of our study raise several questions regarding local shared constraints and universal learning tools, potential supra-local constraints and the status of (ing) as a sociolinguistic variable for learners of English. We discuss these in the final section of this paper.