Abstract:Contact between and mutual influences among varieties of standard and non-standard English have always been a central concern in research on World Englishes. In a mobile and globalising world such contacts are by no means restricted to diffusion of features in face-to-face interaction, across contiguous territories in space or up and down the sociolinguistic scale. In order to better represent and understand the complex relationships obtaining between varieties of standard and non-standard English in the conte… Show more
“…The datasets cover four spoken regional varieties of English (or groups of spoken varieties): dialects of British English (henceforth: BrE), US American English (AmE), New Zealand English (NZE), and Canadian English (CanE). In World Englishes parlance, all of these are "central" or "inner circle" varieties of English (Kachru 1992;Mair 2013), which as advanced native varieties have reached the ultimate stage ("differentiation") in Schneider's (2007) Dynamic Model of the evolution of postcolonial Englishes.…”
This paper introduces a new resource designed to facilitate the quantitative investigation of syntactic variation in spoken language from a comparative perspective. The datasets comprise homogeneously annotated collections of "interchangeable" (i.e. competing) genitive and dative variants in four varieties of English: American English, British English, Canadian English, and New Zealand English. To showcase the empirical potential of the data source, we present a suggestive analysis that investigates the extent to which the probabilistic grammar of genitive and dative variant choice differs across varieties. The statistical analysis reveals that while there are a number of subtle probabilistic contrasts between the regional varieties under study, there is overall a striking degree of cross-varietal homogeneity. We conclude by outlining directions for future research.
“…The datasets cover four spoken regional varieties of English (or groups of spoken varieties): dialects of British English (henceforth: BrE), US American English (AmE), New Zealand English (NZE), and Canadian English (CanE). In World Englishes parlance, all of these are "central" or "inner circle" varieties of English (Kachru 1992;Mair 2013), which as advanced native varieties have reached the ultimate stage ("differentiation") in Schneider's (2007) Dynamic Model of the evolution of postcolonial Englishes.…”
This paper introduces a new resource designed to facilitate the quantitative investigation of syntactic variation in spoken language from a comparative perspective. The datasets comprise homogeneously annotated collections of "interchangeable" (i.e. competing) genitive and dative variants in four varieties of English: American English, British English, Canadian English, and New Zealand English. To showcase the empirical potential of the data source, we present a suggestive analysis that investigates the extent to which the probabilistic grammar of genitive and dative variant choice differs across varieties. The statistical analysis reveals that while there are a number of subtle probabilistic contrasts between the regional varieties under study, there is overall a striking degree of cross-varietal homogeneity. We conclude by outlining directions for future research.
“…In contrast to them, however, I am not primarily interested in the cultural biases of individual national varieties. Rather, I am using a vast corpus consisting of material from twenty national varieties of English to explore the increasingly transnational dimension of the global "English Language Complex" (McArthur 2003: 56;Mesthrie and Bhatt 2008 1-3, 12-17), in the spirit of a framework which I have recently presented in this journal (Mair 2013). What I am looking at is African American Vernacular English speech forms which are related to specific rhetorical-cultural practices.…”
In the short time that it has been available, I have become a regular user of the Global Web-based English Corpus (GloWbE), and I have encouraged students and young researchers to use it, too. GloWbE is a great new resource, and Mark Davies is to be thanked for making it widely and generously available to a global community of linguists and students of the English language, many among whom will be speakers of the varieties of English documented. Mark and Robert's paper offers a useful summary of the corpus design and architecture and presents a wide range of case studies illustrating the potential of the new resource. I have found the case studies convincing in themselves and also capable of inspiring numerous similar projects. What I find encouraging for future work is that Mark and Robert use GloWbE to replicate numerous studies carried out on small corpora, thus proving the robust reliability of the new resource before they move on to use it in order to explore less well-charted territory. The researcher using GloWbE as a stand-alone corpus to investigate mid-and low-frequency phenomena in World Englishes can thus rest assured that, data-wise, they stand on firm ground. Most grammatical constructions and lexicogrammatical variables distinguishing varieties of English are in this frequency band, and currently only GloWbE provides the amount of data and the convenient and powerful search interface needed for systematic comparison across varieties. "Expanding Horizons" indeed.Against the background of this generally very favourable assessment, and in fulfilment of my role as a constructively critical commentator, I may be permitted to raise a number of points which remain to be addressed.
“…Bruthiaux () makes the case that the three circles suffer from perpetuating a nation‐based view of Englishes, which glosses over internal variation and sociolinguistic complexities. In addition, not all Englishes are readily addressed by the model such as English‐based pidgins and creoles (Mufwene ), and more recent sociolinguistic studies emphasize how language forms transcend territorial boundaries, as contained in the notion of superdiversity (Blommaert ; Blommaert & Rampton ) and in the genre or (new) media‐based global spread of forms of English (Pennycook ; Mair ).…”
Section: Previous Models Of World Englishesmentioning
confidence: 99%
“…A world which is marked by criss‐crossing global currents of migration of historically unparalleled intensity and an increasingly all‐encompassing mediascape provides a linguistic ecology in which, at least in principle, all Englishes are everywhere. (Mair : 256)…”
Section: Previous Models Of World Englishesmentioning
Research into world Englishes has continued to expand and diversify since the publication of foundational studies in the late 1970s and early 1980s. From then on, the question of how to model the plurality of Englishes has inspired a range of answers given in different theoretical models. After tracing some of the major approaches to classifying the diversity of Englishes in the world, this paper explores the notion of language contact as an underlying mechanism for all Englishes. A model of language contact is developed, which forms the background for proposing the Language Contact Typology (LCT) of world Englishes. The LCT offers a new way of categorizing Englishes, providing an alternative framing to existing models in the field. It also bears some implications on the controversial notion of 'native speaker' in the world Englishes paradigm.
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