English World-Wide - Current Issue

Although swearing is often perceived as intrinsically offensive language, it is how swearing use is indexed against a person’s understanding of local social norms that constructs swearing as offensive. This paper presents an analysis of swearing within a social context where high frequency swearing is a norm: a male rugby team in New Zealand. Drawing upon a dataset collected from ethnographically collected authentic interactions, an analysis of the frequency of swear words and a comparison with other English corpora is presented, followed by an interactional sociolinguistic analysis of how swearing is used in interactions. The aim of the paper is to demonstrate not only how swearing can be used to engender solidarity, but that a range of socio-pragmatic functions of swearing such as intensifying and indexing a vernacular identity, can be used in performing leadership.

Representativeness in regional dialectology is critical to avoid essentialization when describing regional and ethnic language variation. Yet, regional vowel studies still tend to focus on majority-white communities. Additionally, lack of research on the Great Plains leaves research on regional variation in Latinx Englishes incomplete. We examine a majority-Latinx community in a dialect region where the Low Back Vowel Merger Shift (LBMS) is widespread to examine participation in this sound shift and to document Latinx variation in the Great Plains. Findings illustrate the widespread presence of the LBMS for all participants, but with a less pronounced prenasal trap/ban split. The latter represents a vocalic pattern attested in numerous US Latinx communities. Anglos from the majority-Latinx field site variably pattern with their Latinx peers in their production of ban. These patterns illustrate participation in regional sound changes while also documenting supra-regional variation and local participation in Latinx English variants by Anglo peers.

This article traces the history of the minor complementisers as if, as though, and like (when they follow evidential verbs such as seem and look) in Canadian English. By the 21st century, both as if and as though were rare in Canada, while like appeared to have become popular (López-Couso and Méndez-Naya 2012b). The Victoria English Archive (D’Arcy 2011–2014, 2015; Roeder, Onosson, and D’Arcy 2018) is used to map out the change in a combination of synchronic and diachronic spoken data. Results show that as if and as though are unusual even in the earliest speakers, which puts spoken Canadian English at odds with contemporaneous writing (Brook 2014). However, this unexpected register difference may explain why the complementiser like caught on in North American dialects of English sooner and more readily than in the United Kingdom – where a robust as if and as though in speech would have remained barriers.

This paper presents the Twitter Corpus of Philippine Englishes (TCOPE): a dataset of 27 million tweets amounting to 135 million words collected from 29 cities across the Philippines. It provides an overview of the dataset, and then shows how it can be employed to examine Philippine English (PhilE) and its relationship with extralinguistic factors (e.g. ethno-geographic region, time, sex). The focus is on the patterns of variation involving four PhilE features: (1) irregular past tense morpheme -t, (2) double comparatives, (3) subjunctive were, and (4) phrasal verb base from. My analyses corroborate previous work and further demonstrate structured heterogeneity within PhilE, indicating that it is a multifaceted and dynamic variety. TCOPE has shown itself to be useful for exploring both the “general” features of contemporary PhilE and the different forms of variation within it. It contributes to a deeper understanding of Philippine English(es) over time and in different social contexts.

Work on variable (ing) has highlighted its long-term stability and shared conditioning across English varieties. Here, we ask whether similar stability and conditioning holds in Australian English over time and across ethnicity. The data come from sociolinguistic interviews with 204 Australians stratified according to age, gender, social class and ethnicity, drawn from the Sydney Speaks project. Analyses of 13,000 (ing) tokens reveal very low alveolar rates, but generally similar conditioning to that of other English varieties, with the exception of word class, for which variability was initially largely limited to verbal tokens before extending to include the pronouns something and nothing. Ethnic differences are evident in rates of use: Italian Australians evince higher, and Greek and Chinese Australians lower, rates of [n]. These differences are accounted for by class affiliations, suggesting that (ing) may be an ideal variable for considering the interplay between social class and ethnicity.