English World-Wide - Volume 44, Issue 1, 2023

Abstract

Afrikaans English is seen as connected to White South African English (WSAfE), a Southern Hemisphere English. What makes Afrikaans-speakers’ English varieties distinctly WSAfE or distinctly Afrikaans in a context that has seen much convergence between English and Afrikaans? To answer this question, this study looks at experimental English and Afrikaans phonetic data simultaneously elicited from an informant sample representing three Afrikaans-speaking populations in Namibia, a former dependency of South Africa: the Afrikaners, Basters, and Coloureds. By comparing the informants’ English and Afrikaans vowels, the study establishes that their English varieties display unmistakable WSAfE features, especially found among the Whites, while some of their English vowels co-vary with their nearest Afrikaans equivalents. While generally showcasing the methodological benefits of bilingual data elicitation, the study concludes that postcolonial L2 English varieties are likely to mirror change-in-progress occurring in their historical L1 models, even where access to these models becomes disrupted.

Abstract

This paper investigates the use of Nigerian English in lingua-franca interaction in Germany, focussing on the perspective of the German listener. Fifty-eight German-speaking respondents were asked to transcribe short extracts from English interviews recorded with Nigerian immigrants and sojourners resident in Germany. In addition to testing comprehension, respondents were requested to rate samples along parameters designed to measure speaker likability and competence. The study’s two major findings are that, in spite of the absence of contextual clues, respondents perform better than expected in the comprehension task, but that the single greatest obstacle to comprehension is the presence of German-language material in the stimulus. As realistic English as a Lingua Franca (ELF) interaction in Germany necessarily involves a level of English-German mixing, the experiment thus points to a major practical problem in ELF interaction. The study also yields provisional findings on gender (with male voices being understood better than female ones) and interactions between assumptions about speakers and transcription performance that should be revisited in future research.

Abstract

This study examines the use of general extenders in Nigerian English, from a variational corpus-pragmatic framework, with British English as a reference variety. The data are extracted from the Nigerian and British components of the International Corpus of English. The results reveal that Nigerian English has patterns of use of general extenders that differ systematically from British English. Overall, Nigerian English users employ general extenders less frequently than British English users, as a result of a low preference for disjunctive extenders; there are no significant differences in the frequency of adjunctive and other general extenders between Nigerian and British English users. The study also identifies variants of general extenders unique to Nigerian English such as and all that one, and and other things (like that). In all, the results indicate that register and regional differences play important roles in determining general extender usage among English users.

Abstract

The study aims to work towards a diachronic reconstruction of pragmatic particles in Colloquial Singapore English (CSE, also known as “Singlish”) by exploiting an unused historical data source: The Oral History Interviews held by the National Archives of Singapore (OHI-NAS). We investigate the distribution of five pragmatic particles (ah, lah, leh, lor, and meh) in 101 interviews conducted between 1979 and 2009 in speakers born between 1899 and 1983. Lim (2007) reconstructs the origin of these particles in different substrate languages, with the first two particles (ah and lah) being traceable to earlier Bazaar Malay and/or Hokkien, while the latter three (leh, lor, and meh) are of later Cantonese origin. The results of the present study show that ah and lah are the most frequent particles attested earliest. Their frequency of use increases over time, being additionally contingent on the gender and age of the speakers, their educational level, and their ethnic background. The particles ah and lah are mostly used in assertive contexts.

Abstract

English is the most used language in the Falkland Islands; however, Spanish was also spoken in the 19th century, when beef livestock farming was one of the economic engines of the Islands. Such businesses used to be managed by gauchos from South America, and their presence is still evident in the lexicon of Falkland Islands English. This article presents a novel methodological approach to the elaboration of loanwords corpora. Loanwords are later analysed in terms of their occurrence, frequency, appearance in dictionaries and the semantic fields they have penetrated. We have attempted to account for the volume of words that Spanish speakers lent to the Islands’ English. We observed that Spanish loanwords are mainly – though not exclusively – related to horse tack and horse types: it is clear from our data that most words are tightly connected to gauchos’ vernacular and not exclusively with their equestrian duties.

This article reviews English on Croker Island: The Synchronic and Diachronic Dynamics of Contact and Variation114.9597831107077559783110707854

This article reviews The Dynamics of English in Namibia: Perspectives on an Emerging VarietyEUR 99978-902-720-919-1