After a discussion of factors of time, cohesion, style and rhythm formants in the context of speech registers, a brief appraisal of relevant approaches to the rhythms of natural speech is provided and exploratory case studies of oral narrative registers are conducted using a novel speech modulation theoretic framework, rhythm formant theory (RFT), and its associated methodology of rhythm formant analysis (RFA). The versatility of this framework is shown in applications to narrations of different types: toddler dialogue at an early stage in first-language acquisition, the narrative genre of African village communities, the fluency of reading aloud in English as a second language (L2), a comparison between newsreading and poetry reading in English, and a comparison of recitations of different Chinese poetry genres. Unlike earlier phonetic and phonological analyses of the "linguistic rhythm" of words and sentences, the novel analyses deal with natural real-time rhythms in recordings of authentic data that may be several minutes long, using utterance-long spectral analysis time windows.

This chapter looks at English in Uganda, Rwanda, Burundi, the Democratic Republic of Congo and South Sudan – at first sight countries at the periphery of World Englishes research and theory, given the size of their populations, their economic weight, and the impact their varieties and uses of English have had on others. It traces the histories and the present-day sociolinguistic situation of English in the five countries, of which only South Sudan and Uganda share a colonial past of British control. The current chapter also provides an outline of the similarities across and differences between their Englishes and discusses how continuing regional migration and influence from exogenous varieties of English have contributed to their shape and whether Uganda and Ugandan English play an epicentral role in the region.

British colonial invasion of the Australian continent has had a substantial and often devastating impact on the lives and livelihoods of the original inhabitants. The story of survival is therefore partly one of linguistic adaptation and innovation. For as invasion, displacement and forced relocation rolled across the continent, the language ecologies were also invaded, disturbed and displaced. English has been inserted into the linguistic landscape and contact with its speakers has seeded many new varieties. This chapter surveys the literature that captures this spectacular proliferation of English-influenced varieties; their linguistic structures and the sociolinguistic contexts that make them unique. The chapter ends by focusing on one of the key issues in the study of contact Englishes in Australia: the relationship between individual and community multilingualism.

This chapter begins by describing the pre-history of southern China and the origins of colonial Hong Kong. It then proceeds to a discussion of English in the late nineteenth century and the formation of an English-speaking Chinese elite in colonial Hong Kong. Since the resumption of Chinese sovereignty in 1997, the government has promoted a policy of “trilingualism” (Cantonese, English, and Putonghua) and “biliteracy” (written Chinese and English). Recently, the national government has moved to assert tighter control over the territory, and there has been increasing importance placed on the learning and use of the national language, Putonghua. At present, English continues to be widely used in key domains of Hong Kong society, including government, law and many areas of employment. This is likely to continue in the future, despite Hong Kong’s increasing integration economically, politically, socially, and linguistically into mainland China.

This chapter first discusses the label ‘English as a second and foreign language’ and then gives a brief selective account of how English arrived in Africa and Asia and how it was initially taught and to whom. The work of three influential language teachers who worked in Asia – Palmer in Japan, Faucett in China and West in Bengal - is reviewed. The chapter then illustrates how local varieties of English have developed in postcolonial settings and how the use of English as a lingua franca has increased in countries that were not colonies of Britain or the United States. The current relevance of the terms English as a second or as a foreign language is questioned as it is argued that English now comprises a multitude of new varieties and plays a major role as the international lingua franca.

This chapter provides an overview of the evolution of English in Ghana. The absence of a sizable number of settlers, different language and education policies and sociodemographic developments have shaped the variety considerably. Real-time analyses of sociolinguistic and structural developments in the nativisation phase have become possible with the Historical Corpus of English in Ghana (HiCE Ghana), a 600,000-word corpus of Ghanaian English from the early stages of the nativisation phase. The Ghanaian component of the International Corpus of English (ICE) represents the late stages. Many lexical innovations were already deeply entrenched in the older data and Ghanaian English noun phrases have become more complex in line with predictions made by the Dynamic Model. The paper is rounded off with an outline of new diachronic approaches to Ghanaian English based on a corpus of material from the archives of the Ghana Broadcasting Corporation and an idea for a diachronic corpus of African newspapers.

This chapter traces the historical development of English in South Korea, which despite its long isolation and late contact with the language has turned into a fervent adopter of English as linguistic, symbolic, and economic capital. Particular focus lies on the history of English in the South Korean education system and the outcomes of the contact between Korean and English (i.e., Englishized Korean and Korean(ized) English). The United States Army Military Government in Korea (1945–1948) set the foundation for the compelling status of English in South Korea and the current chapter presents a case study of the language ideologies represented in three Korean English textbooks published during this period. While rudimentary notions of the ideologies of necessitation and externalization can already be found in the examined textbooks from the 1940s, all of the material was firmly grounded in the Korean context and clearly reflected the pro-American sentiments of the era.

A phenomenon that received considerable attention is the propensity for an alternating rhythm in speech. However, algorithms for the calculation of linguistic rhythm are sparse and limited to binary alternation and very short and isolated structures. In the context of a production study, I introduce an algorithm for the calculation of rhythmic well-formedness that goes beyond such a binary alternation and works for sequences larger than short phrases. The algorithm is based on the idea that rhythmicity is defined by a balanced distance of similarly prominent syllables. The study shows that the produced sentences as well as the perceived prominence of the German object pronoun ihn, "him," vary systematically with the predicted degree of rhythmicity. The algorithm can be applied to any linguistic structure once the accented syllables are identified.

The New Cambridge History of the English Language is aimed at providing a contemporary and comprehensive overiew of English, tracing its roots in Germanic and investigating the contact scenarios in which the language has been an active participant. It dis

The modern nation of Papua New Guinea is a colonial construct where English and its pidgin-creole daughter language, Tok Pisin, share an intertwined history and contemporary linguistic ecology, each with its official and unofficial roles and each influencing the other. Today at least half of all Papua New Guineans use Tok Pisin and/or English for day-to-day communication in this country with more than 840 distinct languages. Tok Pisin is the dominant medium of oral and informal communication, even as English remains the dominant medium of written and formal communication. The morphology and syntax of Tok Pisin show characteristics that are typical for the languages of its first speakers. Its lexicon is mainly English, but high-frequency words of German, Kuanua, and Chinese Pidgin origin are indicative of a complicated history. Papua New Guinea English has been heavily influenced by Tok Pisin.

The analysis of low-frequency amplitude envelopes has become a widespread method in the speech sciences, language acquisition, and neurolinguistics. Amplitude envelopes track an utterance’s amplitude distribution and hence the part of the signal that conveys speech rhythm. Given different methodological decisions, studies are sometimes difficult to compare. This chapter summarizes acoustic and statistic procedures used in the field and focuses on which factors influence the amplitude envelopes in which way, comparing data on aspects that relate to speech rhythm (a language’s rhythm class, speech styles, and phonemic segment length). It furthermore tests the specificity of amplitude envelopes for tracking speech rhythm by analyzing control data with different pitch accent types (that are not expected to influence rhythm). The comparison of various factors with the same procedures allows us to order factors with respect to the magnitude of differences in amplitude modulation spectra and the frequency bands in which differences occur.