English World-Wide - Volume 46, Issue 2, 2025

This paper reports on an Implicit Association Test (IAT)-based investigation of the language-attitudes of the white (Afrikaans and English) speech-communities of South Africa, with a focus on young, L1-Afrikaans speakers. Drawing from an extensive literature review, two hypotheses were formulated: (1) participants would exhibit out-group bias towards Standard South African English over Afrikaans-accented English; (2) contextually relevant socio-demographic and sociolinguistic factors would explain this bias. Contrary to the first hypothesis, L1-Afrikaans speakers showed an implicit bias towards their in-group accent. Gender and family language emerged as significant factors in explaining these results. More specifically, females were found to show significantly more in-group bias than males, while subjects reporting both English and Afrikaans as family languages showed the most in-group bias. Given that the outcomes from this implicit approach provide new insights, further research into the role of gender and language-loyalty within this speech-community through narrative-based elicitation methods is recommended.

In charting the history of Australian English, little attention has hitherto been paid to Western Australia, an extremely isolated colony established in 1829, some 40 years after the First Fleet arrived on the eastern coast. Using a historical sociolinguistic third-wave perspective, this study looks at the linguistic behaviour apparent in diaries and a memoir by two sisters born in the colony in the mid-19th century, finding unconventional spellings which may signal phonological features. Different spellings for the Indigenous loan word referring to a unique local animal, codified in present-day English as quokka, also prompt further investigation of historic records, finding that the spelling and likely pronunciation of the animal’s name has changed over time. As the source language, Nyungar, has no present-day fluent speakers, the original pronunciation of the word is uncertain, but the timing of the apparent shift of its first-syllable vowel may suggest markedness levelling in an emerging dialect.

The paper explores the role of borrowings in Super Bowl commercials in the years 2019–2023 on the example of loanwords from seventeen languages in American English. Data analysis shows five distinctive topic categories according to the roles the borrowings play in the commercials studied. The analysis determines four main roles that fall into two categories: code-switching and intentional use of borrowings. It is possible to distinguish the borrowings used either intentionally or unintentionally within the code-switching category, and borrowings oriented towards either the audience or product within the intentional category. The results demonstrate the general applicability of the code-switching category and high dependability on the context in terms of intentionality. There is a marked tendency for product-oriented borrowings within the intentional category. The intentional category is usually not applicable in the case of lexemes with native counterparts or technical terminology.

This study analyses the structural and aspectual variants of give, take, and make light verb constructions (LVCs) (e.g. make a call) in mesolectal Malaysian English (MalE). A synchronic corpus of online forum data representing contemporary English use in Malaysia was developed for the analysis, and the Spoken British National Corpus 2014 was used as a reference. Findings show that, structurally, MalE LVCs prefer unmodified constructions with an indefinite article in active voice while, aspectually, they are mostly telic. To identify significant structural and aspectual variants of LVCs specific to either MalE or British English (BrE), a correlational analysis was conducted. MalE shows a higher proportion of zero-article LVCs, active voice LVCs, and bounded LVCs marked by prepositional phrase (PP)-to indicating telicity. Notably, mesolectal MalE aligns with BrE in its use of LVCs but diverges in other grammatical forms.