Varieties of English Around the World

After the growth of English and American dialectology since the 1930’s and the expansion of sociolinguistics since the 1960’s, the study of ‘world English’ has emerged in recent years to join these other disciplines. This bibliography is intended to reflect what has been achieved in this area and to serve as an indispensible research tool for further investigations. The bibliography is divided into three parts, each one is preceded by a preface which explains the procedures followed and each of the sections is followed by an index. It classifies the items according to specific areas, ethnic groups, or similar topics.

This volume is about the Anglophone creoles to be found on the Caribbean coast of Central America (Belize, Honduras, Nicaragua, Costa Rica, Panama), and its offshore islands (Providencia, San Andrés and the Caymans) . The study of these Anglophone varieties is comparatively recent and based on current field work from Belize to Panama. One of the interesting features that emerges is the tentative map of diachronic and synchronic relationsships among the Anglophone creoles of the Caribbean, as illustrated partly by the lexicon and partly by grammatical constructions. The studies in this book are based on phonetic transcriptions of speech acts in their social and linguistic context.

This anthology brings together fresh corpus-based research by international scholars. It contrasts southern and northern hemisphere usage on variable elements of morphology and syntax. The nineteen invited papers include topics such as irregular verb parts, pronouns, modal and quasimodal verbs, the perfect tense, the progressive aspect, and mandative subjunctives. Lexicogrammatical elements are discussed: light verbs (e.g. have a look), informal quantifiers (e.g. heaps of), no-collocations, concord with government and other group nouns, alternative verb complementation (as with help, prevent), zero complementizers and connective adverbs (e.g. however). Selected information-structuring devices are analyzed, e.g. there is/are, like as a discourse marker, final but as a turn-taking device, and swearwords. Australian and New Zealand use of hypocoristics and changes in gendered expressions are also analyzed. The two varieties pattern together in some cases, in others they diverge: Australian English is usually more committed to colloquial variants in speech and writing. The book demonstrates linguistic endonormativity in these two southern hemisphere Englishes.

Contemporary Indian English: Variation and Change offers the first comprehensive description of Indian English and its emerging regional standard in a corpus-linguistic framework. Drawing on a wealth of authentic spoken and written data from India (including the Kolhapur Corpus and the International Corpus of English), this book explores the dynamics of variation and change in the vocabulary and grammar of contemporary Indian English. The aims are to document the extent of lexical and grammatical nativization at the beginning of the twenty-first century and compare contemporary Indian English to other varieties around the world (for example British and American English). The results are relevant to sociolinguists, variationists and lexicologists seeking to investigate ongoing language change in emerging standard varieties of English. With its strong empirical foundation and its comparative outlook, the book is also of interest to anyone looking for an introduction to the corpus-based description of varieties of English.

This volume is concerned with one of the few thorough-going Labovian studies carried out in Britain. Based on a survey of over hundred randomly selected informants from the towns of Bradford, Halifax and Huddersfield, it deals first with the methodology employed, and then sketches some aspects of the ‘traditional’ dialects of the area before describing a large number of variables. Other non-standard features encountered during the survey are described, since these too are part of the changing patterns of speech in West Yorkshire. The final chapter draws a distinction between ‘dialect’ and ‘accent’ which is slightly different from that generally employed, and suggests that while ‘dialect’ features seem to have declined under the pressure of the standard language, ‘accent’ still persists as a social differentiator.

The present book describes the English language in all its facets as spoken in present-day Dublin, the capital of the Republic of Ireland. It covers the entire range of its history since the first arrival of English there several hundred years ago. Apart from the evolution of English in the capital, the book also concentrates on the significant changes which have been taking place in the speech of Dublin in the past 15 years or so. The rapid change of Dublin English is seen as a correlate to the many social and economic developments which have occurred in recent years. The type of linguistic change in Dublin is driven by dissociation (the mirror-image of accommodation) and will be of particular interest to scholars working within the ‘language variation and change’ framework as it will to those more generally concerned with varieties of English and their specific profiles vis à vis more standard forms of English.

Varieties of English in the U.S. and Canada display fascinating developments from colonial times up until the twenty-first century. To throw light on the linguistics of North American Englishes and their socio-historical contexts, this volume brings together research from various traditions, including corpus linguistics, variation studies, dialectology, historical sociolinguistics, historical pragmatics, language ideology, and the enregisterment framework. In the ten chapters of the volume, a wide variety of sources, published and unpublished, containing evidence of past language use in the U.S. and Canada are introduced and exploited for novel insights. Among the research questions addressed are the following: how to best model the emergence of new varieties of English in North America? Are morphological Americanisms historical retentions, post-colonial revivals, or progressive innovations? What is distinctly Canadian in the context of North American Englishes? How can synchronic dialects be used to examine trajectories of change in the history of Canadian English?

This book presents an account of English in the communicative repertoires of anglophone West-Africans living in Southwestern Germany. Adopting an ethnographically grounded perspective, it analyzes how participants perceive and utilize English as well as other linguistic resources at their disposal in an environment where linguistic competence is routinely under scrutiny. The book traces how linguistic practices participate in the construction of socially meaningful spaces and images of personhood and how discourse about language enables participants to position themselves in relation to these constructions. In the process, notions of languages and varieties themselves are used in surprising and sometimes conflicting ways. While these are at odds with descriptive linguistic terminology, the book takes them seriously as expressing local understandings of the relationship among ways of speaking and social positions. At the theoretical level, the book advances a shift in World Englishes research towards a reflexive approach grounded in linguistic anthropological perspectives.

This volume provides the first-ever comprehensive analysis of a potential variety of English, spoken in the Greek part of the Mediterranean island of Cyprus. Despite the fact that Cyprus was a British colony from 1878 to 1960, the status of the English language spoken there has not yet been discussed systematically within the framework of World Englishes. To determine whether English in Cyprus has second-language variety status or should rather be considered as learner English, the monograph investigates its historical, sociopolitical and sociolinguistic background and, drawing on a corpus of spoken data, offers a synchronic analysis of linguistic features. The results suggest to rethink some of the well-established taxonomies of World Englishes research, especially those that strictly differentiate between second-language varieties and learner Englishes. This renders the book relevant not only to scholars working in the field of World Englishes but also to second language acquisition researchers.

Diasporic populations offer unique opportunities for the study of language variation and change. This volume is the first collection of sociolinguistic studies of English use across the historically complex and widely dispersed Indian diaspora. The contributions describe particular sociohistorical contexts (the UK, Fiji, South Africa, Singapore, and the Caribbean) and then use this rich empirical base to examine diverse questions in theory and method, such as the extent to which different settings see different or similar linguistic outcomes; the role of community structures, transnational ties, attitudes, and identity; reasons for differing rates of change, adaptation, and focussing; and the relevance of endonormative stabilization of Asian Englishes. These themes do not simply further our understandings of diaspora. They can ultimately feed into wider theoretical questions in language contact studies, including universals, selection and adaptation of traits, and interactions between social contact, identity, and language change.