Sri Lankan English is a postcolonial English in South Asia with its origins dating back to the end of the eighteenth century. Its evolution is reflected in a plethora of unique English-language structures and distinct quantitative preferences. Against the background of its historical development, this chapter provides an overview of the local features of Sri Lankan English in its sound system, lexis, syntax and semantics, but also points out that Sri Lankan English features traces of pragmatic nativisation. The documentation of the structural and pragmatic emancipation of Sri Lankan English from its historical input variety of British English is framed by sociolinguistic findings about speaker groups and domains associated with English as well as about attitudes towards different varieties of English. Together with a global account of Sri Lankan English from both formal and sociolinguistic perspectives, this chapter considers potential epicentral constellations among South Asian Englishes.

The current chapter provides a historical sociolinguistic overview of English in Zimbabwe. It challenges anachronistic descriptive taxonomies that in colonial times aligned ‘L1 English’ with the variety spoken by white English-speaking monolinguals and ‘L2 English’ with black multilinguals for whom English might be a second, third or even fourth spoken language and stereotypically, assumed to be marked by pronunciation and grammatical features from the background language(s). This chapter describes varieties of English in the Zimbabwe setting at the levels of morphosyntax, phonology, lexis and discourse in both spoken and written contexts, drawing both upon the research literature and the author’s own corpus of conversational and interview speech of Zimbabweans of a range of ages, ethnicities, educational, socio-economic and language backgrounds. The chapter presents English in Zimbabwe as a collection of varieties and repertoires, performed contingently depending upon such factors as ethnicity and race, time, audience, ideology, rural-urban divide, socio-economic conditions and education.

The term “prosody” encompasses properties of speech that span several timescales and levels of linguistic units, from the intensity and pitch of phonemes and syllables to the overall timing and intonation of utterances and conversations. Hierarchical temporal structure was introduced as a measure of clustering in sound energy that quantifies the relationship among timescales of prosody and related aspects of speech and music. The present chapter reviews several studies showing that the degree of hierarchical temporal structure in speech signals, as measured by the rate of increase in clustering with timescale, reflects the degree of prosodic composition. Prosodic composition can serve different purposes in communication, including linguistic emphasis and chunking in infant-directed speech, scaffolding of spoken interactions with children whose speech abilities are relatively less developed, and stricter timing in formal interactions. Prosodic composition as expressed by hierarchical temporal structure may serve as a control parameter in speech production and communication.

This chapter surveys the origins and history of English in the South Atlantic Ocean, on Tristan da Cunha, St Helena and the Falkland Islands, from the late sixteenth century to the present day. Their evolution is a showcase scenario of contact and koinéization in that a substantial stock of British settlers had permanent contact with speakers of other languages or forms of English as a Second Language. There were concomitant cases of dialect contact, input from restructured varieties (possibly Portuguese Creoles), African languages, as well as interaction as a group of St Helenians cross-migrated to Tristan da Cunha. The community’s founders found themselves in tabula rasa conditions and had no contact with pre-existing varieties. The varieties formed ab ovo via direct contact of the inputs brought to the islands, enabling the reconstruction of social factors and population dynamics at work during the development of overseas Englishes.

This chapter provides a detailed description of the socio-historical background of English in Fiji, Samoa and the Cook Is lands discussing the spread of English from the first contact with English explorers and traders to the impact of English after political (semi-)independence. It further includes the first real-time study on language variation and change from the Cook Islands. Three Cook Island women of three generations were recorded twice within 10 years. Comparing intra- and inter-speaker variation in terms of lexis, grammar and accent features, the study shows differences between the three individuals, which opens up a debate on the role of the individual in language change and the future of L2 Englishes in the South Pacific. The chapter confirms that empirical diachronic research on English in the South Pacific yields insights into variety formation.

Many studies in the linguistic literature have tried to explain the rhythmic component of speech by resorting to the notion of isochrony. The problems with such approaches have been demonstrated in various recent works, owing to the fact that natural speech is highly irregular and quasi-periodic at best. Rhythm also plays a role in the link between brain oscillations and linguistic constituents, where entrainment is often assumed to be the underlying mechanism. Here too, the non-isochronous nature of the speech signal led recent works to call for a more nuanced understanding of entrainment in the context of language. We suggest that rhythm is the timescale within which temporal relationships between isolated events are perceived (about 0.5–12 Hz). We claim that while music tends to use this timescale to promote phase-locking to an external clock, language exploits it to achieve an effective distinction between fast and slow rates in prosody.

The temporal signatures that characterize speech – especially its prosodic qualities – are observable in the movements of the hands and bodies of its speakers. A neurobiological account of these prosodic rhythms is thus likely to benefit from insights on the neural coding principles underlying co-speech gestures. Here we consider whether the vestibular system, a sensory system that encodes movements of the body, contributes to prosodic processing. Careful review of the vestibular system’s anatomy and physiology, its role in dynamic attention and active inference, its relevance for the perception and production of rhythmic sound sequences, and its involvement in vocalization all point to a potential role for vestibular codes in the neural tracking of speech. Noting that the kinematics and time course of co-speech movements closely mirror prosodic fluctuations in spoken language, we propose that the vestibular system cooperates with other afferent networks to encode and decode prosodic features in multimodal discourse and possibly in the processing of speech presented unimodally.

The developmental community is beginning to embrace the idea of exaggerated rhythm in infant- and child-directed speech providing critical information during early language acquisition. Here, we consider I/CDS as a special case of language, with enhanced multimodal temporal and prosodic cues, attuned to the needs of the listener. The evidence supporting this idea is largely based on language disorders (e.g., dyslexia, DLD), with relatively sparse extant literature on typical language development. However, the field is rapidly growing, with methodological advances in cortical and behavioral rhythmic tracking allowing us to better understand the organizing principles of speech and language processing. We address the multiple approaches adopted across research communities, providing a commentary on both the reach and suitability of these methods. From a nascent literature, the chapter aims to paint a coherent picture of the field’s current state, providing recommendations for future research.

Intonation units (IUs) are a fundamental prosodic unit of all known human languages, and as such they likely constitute an absolute universal property of language. IUs are chunks defined by a specific pattern of syllable delivery, together with resets in pitch and articulatory force. In this chapter we discuss IUs from four different perspectives and introduce them within the context of rhythms of speech, language, and the brain. First, we provide a detailed description of how IUs are defined. Second, we review linguistic research on the roles of IUs in communication, including their cross-linguistic applicability. This body of research suggests that IUs provide a universal structural cue for the cognitive dynamics of speech production and comprehension at a timescale of ~1 Hz. Third, we synthesize the linguistic perspective with findings from the study of brain rhythms and cognition. Finally, we review the existing algorithmic tools for IU identification from speech acoustics, to facilitate the incorporation of IUs in experimental and quantitative research.

The temporal structure of speech provides crucial information to listeners for comprehension: In particular, the slow modulations in the amplitude envelope constitute important landmarks to discretize the continuous signal into linguistic units. Contemporary models of speech perception attribute a major functional role to brain rhythmic activity in this process: By aligning their phase to the quasi-periodic patterns in speech, neural oscillations would facilitate speech decoding. We here review evidence from EEG/MEG studies showing neural theta-range (~4–8 Hz) tracking of syllabic rhythm, with a special interest in speech rate variations. We also discuss to what extent neural oscillatory coupling contributes to, and is in turn modulated by, speech intelligibility, namely whether it is only acoustically or also linguistically guided. We finally review some findings showing that in addition to auditory cortex, motor regions play an active role in the oscillatory dynamic underlying speech processing.

The prosody of spoken language is characterized by quasi-rhythmic features, which are perceivable by the fetus already from the third trimester of gestation. Recent research studying infant cognition is increasingly focusing on oscillations as a reliable measure of brain responses to quasi-rhythmic auditory stimuli, such as speech at different levels of granularity. There is indeed increasing evidence for a match between the frequency of neural oscillations and the rates of different linguistic units, such as phonemes, syllables, and phrases, both in adults and children. Here we review recent advances in how neural activity aligns with language input at different levels of language structure and organization, at different developmental stages in the first year of life. Importantly, we discuss how this neural architecture may support the development of grammar.