English World-Wide - Current Issue

Abstract

This paper investigates spelling practices in Nigerian Pidgin (NigP) computer-mediated communication (CMC) as well as Nigerians’ perceptions of these. The first part is a corpus-based analysis. It shows that conventionalization of spelling variants is taking place in the absence of formal standardization. Furthermore, we observe the application of general CMC respelling strategies, e.g. vowel reduction. The second part is a survey study where participants were asked to judge the correctness of spelling variants. When the corpus results indicated the existence of a conventionalized spelling, the participants tended to either endorse this or, when shown an alternative, suggest it as the correct form; items that are more variable in the corpus yielded more mixed results. We apply and elaborate on the notion of “standardization from below” (Elspaß 2021) and we argue that the existence of conventionalized NigP spellings makes possible deviations from these in CMC-typical fashion just as in Standard English.

Abstract

This study investigates primary-stress placement in Nigerian L1 English (NL1E), an emerging accent of young Nigerians who acquire English as a first language, in order to account for the speakers’ stress patterns and the factors influencing them. In total, 194 lexical items were analysed, comprising 82 disyllabic words, 52 trisyllabic words and 60 morphologically complex words extracted from a passage read by 100 participants. The results reveal a blend of two stress systems — inner circle and distinctive NigE — with a slight preference for the inner-circle stress norms. Syllable weight and affix type were found to significantly influence stress placement. The findings portray NL1E stress as a hybrid system drifting towards the exonormative standard, possibly driven by the speakers’ continuous exposure to inner-circle accents through diction instruction and non-enculturation sources of learning.

Abstract

While New Zealand English (NZE) is a highly researched variety of English due to its variable monophthongal system, one community in New Zealand remains greatly under-researched — the Gloriavale Christian Community. This community gives us a laboratory insight into how new dialect formation (NDF) and isolation interplay in the formation of a new accent. Furthermore, we investigate how this accent may differ by gender as the community exhibits high levels of sex segregation. We investigate vocalic variation of eight NZE monophthongs in 24 Gloriavale speakers and compare their findings to a less isolated New Zealand community. We find that Gloriavale vowels show greater rates of change compared to the less isolated community, with most of these changes following the majority settler dialect (i.e. NZE). When we look at gender differences, the Gloriavale women exhibit monotonic sound change towards a broad NZE dialect with innovative GOOSE and NURSE vowels, while the Gloriavale men exhibit age-graded variation. We discuss the former findings considering the NDF and isolation literature, while the gender findings require understanding of Communities of Practice research and general principles of sound change.

Abstract

Treebanks (parsed corpora) play an important role in linguistic research, but creating high-quality parses can be very labor-intensive. This paper discusses the prospects of creating such parses in the context of New Englishes and what kinds of research insights parses can deliver. We present Singapore English as a case study. We suggest that despite the many contact-derived lexical and grammatical properties of Singapore English, it is quite feasible to apply an off-the-shelf American English parser to generate parses of Singapore English. In addition, we present an exploratory analysis of noun phrases in a Singapore English treebank, to illustrate the potential of parses and treebanks in research on World Englishes.

This article reviews World Englishes: The Local Lives of a Global Language$ 29.95978-1-4744 8630 9