Attitudes Towards Exogenous and Endogenous Uses of English: Ugandan’s Judgements of English Structures in Varieties of English

Abstract

Uganda is a former British protectorate, where English has contributed to the country’s linguistic ecology since 1894, when the British established a protectorate over the area of the Buganda kingdom. Over time, Ugandan English has developed as a nativised second language variety, spoken by Uganda’s indigenous population. At the same time, due to migrations, globalisation and the influence of international media and the Internet, its speakers have increasingly been in contact with varieties other than British English: American English, Indian English, Kenyan English, and Nigerian English may all influence Ugandan English. This paper looks at how Ugandan English can be conceptualised as a variety shaped by other varieties. It reports on the results of acceptability tests carried out with 184 informants in the North, the Central and the West of Uganda and discusses how speakers assess individual grammatical structures used in Ugandan English and in those varieties they are potentially in contact with.

Post‐protectorate Uganda and current models of influence across Englishes

“…The following sections summarize the overall results of this research project to address the research questions outlined above. More fine‐grained reports of its individual outcomes are available in Meierkord (2019), Meierkord & Isingoma (2022) and Isingoma & Meierkord (2022).…”

Politeness strategies in Ugandan English: making requests and responding to thanks

“…Note that in the context of Uganda' s school settings, the terms 'ungrammatical', 'incorrect' and 'unacceptable' are used interchangeably, as English is mainly acquired in school contexts, where such prescriptivism terms have gained a lot of currency. However, despite the prescriptive practices in the country, which are aligned along British English norms, substrate influence and other L2 acquisition processes make Ugandans deviate from these norms insofar as rejecting some British English forms and perhaps even tending towards endonormativity in keeping with Schneider's (2007) model (see also Meierkord 2020).…”

“…This sometimes triggers the spontaneous use of expressions usually stemming from substrate influence when the interlocutors are involved in naturalistic discourse, as opposed to when the interlocutors are involved in some kind of metalingual reflections, i.e. when they have the leverage to have recourse to exonormative rules taught at school (see also Meierkord 2020).…”