English World-Wide - Volume 33, Issue 2, 2012

This article argues that the external history of South African English (SAfE) points towards the merits of conceptualizing SAfE as the product of a three-stage koinéization process, the last stage of which takes place contemporaneously with the establishment of Johannesburg. This is at odds with the standard position, which views SAfE as an early-to-mid 19th-century variety with its characteristic features having been fixed during the earlier colonization of the Cape and Natal. This reconceptualization is, in turn, usefully employed to solve Trudgill’s (2004) so-called “South African puzzle’’: in essence, the postulation of SAfE as a late 19th-century English explains why START-Backing has occurred in SAfE but not in the closely related Australasian varieties.

This paper studies the distribution and usage patterns in hypothetical if-clauses in a set of South Asian Englishes (SAEs), namely Indian, Pakistani, Bangladeshi and Sri Lankan English on the basis of web-derived newspaper data. Comparative evidence comes from newspaper texts in the British National Corpus (BNC). It looks at the use of subjunctive were, indicative was and modal would as variant verb forms in the if-clause. The qualitative analyses also consider tense sequencing in the main and subordinate clause. In terms of overall frequencies, the SAEs do not cluster together in their use of the subjunctive but form a gradient or cline with British English at one end. Similarities between the SAEs emerge from the qualitative analyses. An additional, serendipitous result of the study concerns the local use in SAEs of the subordinator on if meaning ‘whether’, a pattern that is likely to have its origin in Indian English.

Based on interviews conducted in ten Catholic churches of the Ghanaian capital, Accra, the paper offers a profile of English use in Ghana and reports on the attitudes of Ghanaians toward English as the official language of their country. The results reveal the influential role English plays in the different settings of Ghanaian communication as well as the high esteem afforded to the English language by the majority of Ghanaian respondents. Most of them cited the numerous benefits that English, as a language of wider communication, brings to the individual speaker and the country.

This study uses the tools of corpus linguistics to investigate ascending kinship terminology in the Linguistic Atlas of the Middle Rockies, a collection of interviews gathered in Colorado, Utah, and Wyoming as part of a dialectological survey of the American West. Relying in part on the framework of Dahl and Koptjevskaja-Tamm (2001), particularly with respect to their notion of a parental kin prototype, the study examines lexical and grammatical variation in the use of terms for parents and grandparents in different interviewing contexts in an effort to identify patterns in these distributions. The study finds important quantitative differences in the distribution of mother and father, as well as differences in the grammatical behavior of these and other kinship variants. While these results provide some support for a parental kin prototype, they also suggest the benefits that survey data collected within a variationist framework offer such a prototype, both with respect to the counterexamples to broad generalizations that such datasets inevitably include as well as the variable patterns that often emerge from such data that might go unobserved using formal methods.