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This chapter provides an overview of Indian South African English, which remains an important ethnolect within South Africa, since language shift has resulted in the Indian population having English as its L1 (with the exception of new post-1994 migrants from India). Yet SAIE remains culturally distinct and in turning into an L1, SAIE has not jettisoned the L2 features of three to four decades ago, when shift was at its peak. This position aligns SAIE with Irish English as “language shift varieties”. The L2-features-turned-L1 illustrated in this chapter do not occur as frequently as in the 1970s and 1980s. Many speakers are now polystylistic (in either a general South African English or even an acrolectal standard variety tied slightly more to international than White South African English). However, the former L2 features do surface in the most informal end of the stylistic continuum, especially in in-group speech, as illustrated in this chapter.
This chapter explores the linguistic consequences of language contact between English and Afrikaans in South Africa, focusing on the English spoken by Afrikaans speakers in South Africa. Against the backdrop of two centuries of language contact and bilingualism, the multifaceted nature of interactions in diverse social settings are investigated, and the linguistic outcomes of these settings are outlined. The chapter highlights the bidirectional influence between Afrikaans and English, with evidence of influence mainly from Afrikaans to Afrikaans South African English (ASAE), but the reciprocal influence between ASAE and other vernaculars is also highlighted. The linguistic review describes ASAE pronunciation, vocabulary, grammar, and stylistic features, by offering evidence from corpora, dictionaries and important works on the two ethnic subvarieties of ASAE. Overall, strong similarities with White South African English are found, but some differences reveal the influence from Afrikaans. For phonological features, there are quantity rather than quality differences for the tense-lax vowel contrast and hiatus breaking through [h] that distinguish ASAE from WSAE. For lexicogrammar, ASAE is observed to model its use of lexemes, collocational patterns and more abstract grammatical patterns, on Afrikaans constructions. The likelihood that White South African English speakers are not directly influenced by Afrikaans itself but rather by ASAE is considered as a topic for further study.
This chapter presents English in the Philippines, its evolution from a transported language to its many forms today as Englishes within and beyond Philippine borders. With this within-and-beyond approach to Philippine Englishes (PhEs), a blend of old and new histories is hopefully reached to underscore an important point, namely that English in the Philippines is not fixed nor unaffected by history. English arrived in 1898 with the establishment of the American colonial government. Due to the widespread public education system introduced by the Americans, English leapt from foundation stage to stabilization in a few decades, and proceeded to its present state as differentiated forms. In this chapter, illustrations of Englishes in the everyday realities of multilingual and translingual Filipinos are presented. However, PhEs also spill over borders. In labor migration contexts, PhEs are disentangled in the phenomenal movement of Filipino migrant workers across the globe. In presenting PhEs, we invoke multi/translingual complexities and processes associated with mobility, as we flesh out a more complex and contingent historicizing of Englishes within and beyond the Philippines.
The importance of history in the emergence and evolution of varieties of English around the world cannot be overstated. From religious missionaries to colonial administrations, the particular mix of peoples, languages and cultures was central to the type of evolutionary trajectory English took. This chapter offers a historical account of the evolution of English in Cameroon under missionary, colonial (German, French and British) and postcolonial conditions. It identifies some of the crucial factors that enabled it to survive even when the territory was ruled by non-English colonisers like the Germans and the French. Using written documents produced during colonialism, the current chapter traces the impact of the colonial system on contemporary Cameroonian society and the variety of English spoken there with focus on processes of cultural conceptualisation and hybridised patterns of social interaction. This is done via the lenses of two recent theoretical frameworks, namely cognitive contact linguistics and postcolonial pragmatics. The chapter also identifies some distinctive structural features of contemporary Cameroon English, contrasting some of them to West African and East African Englishes.
The standard model of the historical formation of South African English posits that anglophone SAfE is an early-to-mid nineteenth-century overseas variety of English. In this chapter an alternative, three-stage koinéisation model is advanced which places emphasis on the role played by a koinéisation process in the greater-Johannesburg area spanning the first half of the twentieth century. As such, the first half of the current chapter will be focused on outlining the history of the development of this variety, with a particular focus on the Johannesburg period. The second half is focused on providing evidence from sociolinguistic interviews with twenty-six (26) L1-Broad WSAE speakers born in the first half of the twentieth century, one-half of whom are first-generation speakers from Johannesburg, one-half of whom are (non-first-generation) speakers born in the Eastern Cape. More specifically, the degree of inter- and intra-speaker variability in relation to two sociolinguistic variables (the quality of BATH and (-in/-ing)) is investigated. The results indicate that while there is no clear difference between the two regions in terms of BATH, the presence of substantial -ing/-in variation in the speech of Johannesburg-born speakers points to koinéisation in this area, thus providing support for the three-stage model.
New Zealand English (NZE) is one of the most well-researched varieties of English in the world. This is largely due to the existence of several high-quality spoken corpora, including the Origins of New Zealand English (ONZE) corpus. This corpus has provided the foundation for work on new dialect formation, sociolinguistic variation and sound change. However, published descriptions of the emergence of NZ English are based on data from only a sub-set of speakers from the ONZE corpus. More recent work has begun to utilise data from the full ONZE corpus, and other spoken and written corpora of NZ English. This chapter will first provide an overview of the existing received wisdom on the development of New Zealand English, before focussing on several recent studies showing how much further we have now come in our understanding of the history and development of this variety.
English in Liberia consists of two distinct but overlapping varieties, Kolokwa and Liberian Settler English (LSE), with a third, Standard Liberian English, superposed upon them. Kolokwa (< colloquial) is widely spoken. The Liberian descendant of a more general West African Pidgin English, it has been heavily influenced by LSE. The latter is the language of the descendants of the 16,000 African Americans who immigrated to Liberia in the nineteenth century. This study first presents a political history of English-lexifier varieties in Liberia. Drawing on data collected in the late 1980s, just prior to the outbreak of civil war, it then considers aspects first of LSE and then Kolokwa grammar. It examines LSE vis-à-vis African American English. It frames Kolokwa within the continuum model. A distinctive aspect of LSE and, especially, Kolokwa is the extent of coda consonant deletion; its impact on inflectional morphology is also addressed.
Driven originally by colonization and more recently by globalization, for more than four centuries the English language has been spreading to all corners of the globe, producing distinct and stable young varieties as well as the young discipline of ‘World Englishes’ to describe and analyze them. The present paper surveys and discusses several models that have been developed to explain the bewildering variety of forms and contexts which characterize these varieties. Early classifying approaches include categorizations and visualizations of varieties and variety types based on some of their properties, most importantly Kachru’s ‘Three Circles’ model. An evolutionary perspective is at the center of the ‘Dynamic Model’ of postcolonial Englishes. More recent trends at theorizing capture the ongoing dynamism and diversification of English by highlighting ‘forces’ which drive this process; in general, boundaries between nations are seen as diminishing also through the unbounded spread of linguistic forms in cyberspace. A few more suggestions at and reflections on modelling, most importantly Hundt’s comparison of theoretical and statistical modelling, are summarized and assessed.
This chapter reviews the history and development of Māori and Pasifika Englishes in New Zealand, focusing on both segmental and suprasegmental aspects of their phonetics/phonology. We review evidence that Māori English has higher pitch and more syllable-timed rhythm than Pākehā English, and suggest that a distinctive Māori English voice quality is not yet well understood. L1-type and L2-type varieties of Pasifika English are distinguished, highlighting the role of transfer in the formation of these varieties. The differences between Pākehā, Māori and Pasifika Englishes in New Zealand are a matter of frequency of use, rather than of absolutes, both in terms of the linguistic features and the social variables with which they co-occur. We problematise any straight-forward description of these varieties as revolving solely around ethnicity, given the interconnectedness of ethnic identities in New Zealand.