In Schneider's (2007) influential model, the emergence of positive attitudes towards the local, post-colonial variety is an important step for the evolution of new Englishes, not least of all because it is likely to mark a shift from an external towards an internal norm. This paper explores attitudes towards varieties of English among a group of young Fiji citizens in tertiary education. The results indicate that British English is still a strong reference variety, while American English is clearly favoured over more local Pacific varieties, like Australian and New Zealand English. A closer analysis of the survey data indicates that a simple dichotomy of exo-vs. endonormative orientation may be difficult to maintain in this context.
This article aims to explore the construction of post-diasporic, hybrid local identities in communicative practices of the younger British Gujarati community. It focuses on the host of a popular BBC Asian Network radio show as a prominent voice of this community, who simultaneously embodies and creates linguistic community values through the use of Gujarati-English code-switching. In doing so, it highlights the role of the media in shaping a space for the linguistic negotiation of local and transnational influences. On a methodological level, the article argues for the combination of data from different domains in the context of transnational identity negotiations, such as linguistic behavior, narrative language biographies, private and public meta-linguistic commentary, indications of language status and attitudes towards alternating language use.
This study reports on the methodological challenges of determining and quantifying ethnic identity in questionnaire and interview data from second-generation members of the San Francisco Chinatown community, and linking these identity scores to the use of durational characteristics that we argue are part of the ethnolinguistic repertoires of our participants. We analyse durational features from free speech in interactions with an in-group and an out-group interlocutor for an exemplary sample of four speakers. By thus combining qualitative data on ethnic identity orientation with quantitative sociophonetic results, we show that rhythmic variability in free speech is both possible and traceable, and suggest that speech rhythm can be used as a flexible feature to index ethnic identity.
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