Showing papers in "World Englishes in 2013"

Being "Neutral"? English Pronunciation among Norwegian Learners.

Abstract: This study investigates the pronunciation of English among Norwegian adolescents by applying sociolinguistic methods in a second language context. Results from an auditory analysis of seven phonological variables show a blended use of linguistic features from American English and British English, with some additional pronunciations, forming a hybrid and variable L2 accent. The participants’ pronunciation aligns with their self-expressed target accents. However, American English is the dominant pronunciation, suggesting influence from imported American media. Although the majority of learners aim towards a native accent, a large minority report a wish to avoid native accents and use a neutral variety of English. The variability in the local appropriation of English reflects the transitional status of English in Norway, and contributes to the increasing diversity in the development of English as a global language. The results have implications for English language educators, who must meet the needs of proficient learners in transitional second language environments.

Black South African English on the radio

Abstract: For most rural communities in South Africa, community radio remains the most common mass communication channel which models English speech forms and functions. Whereas print media has received some attention in the earlier works on Black South African English (BSAE) research, the speech tokens used in the radio have not been empirically studied to date. In order to fill this gap and expand previous work on the variety, this study investigated high-frequency features of BSAE drawn from a corpus of 209,000 words from a rural English-medium community radio in Limpopo Province. Normalized frequency rates of syntactic, discourse and pragmatic features were calculated, using corpus quantification procedures, which were complemented by a cross-linguistic analysis of the selected features with an upper limit of 10,000 words. The findings of the study provide evidence that BSAE has evolved alongside the nativization and endonormative phases proposed in Schneider's Dynamic Model and that both the radio usage and reliance on the logic of Bantu language substrate forms, in combination, reinforce its stabilization. Implications for future research directions are offered at the end of the paper.

English-medium instruction at a university in Macau: Policy and realities

Abstract: This paper discusses the sociolinguistic background to the use of English in higher education in Macau by presenting the results of a sociolinguistic survey on the use of English in a privately-owned university in the special administrative region of Macau. A survey of language use and attitudes was administered to 26 teaching staff and 227 undergraduate students at the university in mid-2012. The results report on the status and functions of English at the university, as well as attitudes and ideologies. However, they also point to a gap between the stated policy of the institution and the realities of language use at the university, and also provide insights into the ways in which English is used outside the formal curriculum.1

Second language errors and features of world Englishes

Abstract: While exocentric norms (e.g. British and American English) informed by a second language acquisition (SLA) perspective are prevalent in the Outer Circle, there is a growing recognition of local varieties of Englishes belonging to the world Englishes (WE) paradigm. However, what constitutes an error or a varietal feature is hard to decide, particularly in the absence of codification of non-native Englishes in many Outer Circle contexts. Yet, distinguishing between errors and varietal features is a pedagogical requirement for correcting learners' errors and nurturing their linguistic creativity. Although the WE literature suggests criteria to determine the status of neologisms, these have their limitations. On the other hand, insufficient attention has been given to the agency of English teachers who are in a critical position to mediate language standards and their variations. Against this background, this paper reports a small-scale study involving practising English teachers in Bangladesh to provide a pedagogical perspective on error/innovation issues. Acknowledging the underlying complexity, we argue that understanding teachers' perspectives should be seen as an important research agenda to address learner English/L2 variety issues in L2 pedagogy.

Effects of policy on English-medium instruction in Africa

Abstract: This study examines the effects of policy on English-medium instruction in public schools in Africa. The focus is on illiteracy and elite closure. It argues that policy on English-medium instruction has failed to achieve the key objectives around which it was adopted: spread literacy among and create opportunities for the populace to participate in the socioeconomic and political development of the continent. The paper calls for an inclusive language policy that promotes a dual-medium educational system including an English-medium stream and a vernacular-medium stream to achieve the purported objectives. It warns that for vernacular-medium education to be accepted by the population, however, it must be vested with comparable material returns that are currently associated only with English-medium education.

Contextual variation and Hong Kong English

Abstract: One of the decisive factors in Schneider's innovative Dynamic Model for the transition from phase 3 (nativisation) to phase 4 (endonormative stabilisation) for the case of Hong Kong English (HKE) is the parameter of local acceptance. This paper examines the attitudes of young professionals towards native vis-a-vis non-native English accents in a number of English-speaking contexts in Hong Kong by means of the verbal-guise technique, focus group discussions and a written task. The findings suggest that many of the participants have the ability to distinguish native speakers’ from non-native speakers’ accents. Although an Anglophone-centric attitude is still found to be prominent in high-stakes English-using situations, there seems to be a tendency that the less formal and more interactive the communication context, the fewer reservations the participants have about non-native accents. The correlation analysis indicates a lack of association between the participants’ perceived intelligibility and their preferred accents in nearly all of the designated contexts for the case of HKE and, thus, the paper offers explanations based on the tension between English pronunciation as economic capital and identity carrier in local people's perception. It concludes by discussing the implications of this contextual variation in pronunciation acceptance for future attitudinal studies.

Globalization, postcolonial Englishes, and the English language press in Kenya, Singapore, and Trinidad and Tobago

Abstract: This paper analyzes online English-language newspapers from the former British colonies of Kenya, Singapore, and Trinidad and Tobago with respect to Americanisms in spelling and vocabulary. The guiding question is whether the degree of Americanization can be related to the different degrees to which these countries participate in globalization. It is shown that the influence of American English is least pronounced in Kenya and most in Trinidad and Tobago, with Singapore in between, and that globalization is indeed a factor, but that other factors including official language attitudes play a role as well. The role of international news agencies in disseminating Americanisms is also considered and is found to be prominent mainly in the case of Singapore.

World Englishes and international call centres

Abstract: Call centres (or telephone ‘contact centres’) of various kinds have become an increasing fact of life for many people in Europe, North America and other developed economies. Although telephone contact centres may be dated back to the 1960s and 1970s in the US, their intrusion into the lives of British and US consumers has grown exponentially since the 1980s. Since the early 2000s, however, a significant number of call centre operations have been outsourced to such destinations as India and the Philippines, thereby raising a number of issues relating to language and globalisation and the politics of English as an international language.

English in Italian advertising

Abstract: Language mixing in advertising, particularly with the English language, has been a widely researched area. English is generally used to connote products with a cosmopolitan, international, modern and ‘cool’ hue, and is increasingly mixed with local languages to combine global with local appeal. This paper provides a qualitative investigation of print advertisements selected from a corpus collected in 2009/2010, which discusses processes of language creativity exploiting both English, and English and Italian language mixing. The findings suggest that English is occurs frequently in print adverts addressed to Italian readers/consumers. While slogans and headlines still represent the main areas where English is employed as an authoritative, dominant voice, language mixing with English appears not to be limited to isolated lexical borrowings. English is exploited as an attention-getter, as a marker of cosmopolitan and international values, but also as a resource upon which to draw in terms of linguistic and cross-linguistic creativity.

The prosodic marking of information status in Malaysian English

Abstract: This paper investigates the prosodic strategies used by Malaysian speakers of English to mark the information status of new and given discourse elements. Thirty speakers of Malaysian English were recorded both when playing a game designed by Swerts, Krahmer, and Avesani (2002) to elicit semi-spontaneous speech and when reading out a 179-word story. Pitch accent placement in the semi- spontaneous speech was analysed auditorily, while six given and new word pairs in each reading passage were analysed acoustically in terms of the phonetic realisation of the pitch accent (following Atterer and Ladd 2004). In addition, 11 speakers of Malaysian English participated in a perception experiment testing their identification of new and given discourse elements in these recordings. Results show that Malaysian speakers of English do not mark given and new information with distinct pitch accent placement and that it is not possible to categorise these utterance elements unambiguously according to their information status. The acoustic analysis showed that given information is marked by a later pitch trough and a smaller rise than new information. No difference between the two, however, was found in terms of pitch peak alignment.

Political discourse in China's English language press

Abstract: This paper discusses some of the ways in which the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) uses language in its English media. After a historical overview of political ‘fixed formulations’ (tifa) in China through the ages, we look at specific terms in their contemporary forms as they appear in China's major English language newspaper, the China Daily. Data taken from a specialized corpus focusing on the term ‘harmonious society’ is investigated for information on how the term is used and with which language patterns it most frequently appears. In terms of world Englishes, usage may be classified as an Outer Circle Chinese English lexis as the formulations are translated from Chinese, making them a distinctly ‘Chinese’ type of politicized English. Linguistically, ‘harmonious’ often collocates with effusive modifiers and dynamic-sounding verbs, which portray growth and stability. The English of China's political media does not have much currency outside of the CCP ‘news’ context and due to its distinctive ideological characteristics, it has been labelled Zhonglish, Xinhua English or New China Newspeak. Preliminary research shows evidence of formulations being increasingly picked up by the media in geographically surrounding areas and even overseas.

Dative alternation in Indian English: A corpus‐based analysis

Abstract: The dative alternation refers to the alternation between two constructions that denote some type of transfer: the double object construction (I give my sister a book) vs. the to-dative construction (I give a book to my sister). We examined the motivations behind the dative alternation in Indian English. A corpus study was performed based on a sample of N = 943 sentences that were drawn from the Kolhapur corpus. Using a mixed-effects logistic regression analysis, we evaluated the effect of 14 predictors that are known to influence the dative alternation in other macro-regional varieties of English. Three predictors were found to be significant: the sentence verb (modeled as a random intercept), the pronominality of the Recipient and the difference in length between the Recipient and the Theme. Our results further corroborate earlier findings that the to-dative construction is more frequently used in Indian English than in other varieties. We argue that the latter tendency may be associated with a transfer from Hindi.

The ownership of Aboriginal English in Australia

Abstract: A widely-observed postcolonial phenomenon is the indigenization of English by communities into which it was formerly involuntarily introduced. When this takes place, the community which has appropriated English to serve its own purposes regards the language as their own. The question of the ownership of English has been extensively discussed by applied linguists against the background of globalization and the need for TESOL teachers to agree on what they can legitimately claim to teach. Aboriginal English is non-standard and has a long history in Australia of marginalization. This paper argues, on the basis of Australian and international evidence, that claims of ownership of a dialect of English entail questions of identity, authenticity, group membership and language rights. In particular, it investigates the bidialectal tension affecting Aboriginal Australians, involving ambivalence to Standard English, potential misinterpretation of the unqualified term ‘English’ and the cross-cultural use of schemas in interpreting speakers of the other dialect. The paper concludes by addressing the question of under what conditions, in view of the assertion of ownership of English by Aboriginal English speakers, education may successfully equip them to operate in a world which requires Standard English.

Discourse particles in Colloquial Singapore English

Abstract: The research looked into choices by speakers of Colloquial Singapore English with different ethnicities (Chinese, Indian and Malay) in the use of particles whose roots lie not in English. The 76 speakers under investigation used 1,427 such particles in 30 conversations. The general rate of particle usage by the members of each ethnicity was similar. The particles lah and ah, whose linguistic origins are unknown and which account for almost 94 per cent of the total particle use, were both frequently used across ethnic groups. The Chinese speakers used these articles less than the other two ethnicities and were more inclined than the other two groups to use Cantonese particles, especially lor. Two other Cantonese particles, hor and leh, were used six and nine times respectively, and these rare instances were exclusively produced by Chinese speakers. Indian speakers did not distinguish between the number of particles in intra- and interethnic settings, while the other two groups did, especially the Malay speakers, for this group the difference was significant. Our research shows that while ethnic patterns seem absent in the use of the most frequent CSE particles, infrequent particles may nevertheless reveal such patterns. Future research should focus on infrequent CSE particles.

Countability in world Englishes

Abstract: In this study we explored variation in the countability of nouns in Outer Circle, Expanding Circle and lingua franca Englishes, a phenomenon which is frequently cited as a marker of Inner Circle norms in TESOL and of endonormative and emerging varieties in the Outer and Expanding Circles. We inspected a set of mass nouns like information and equipment in the VOICE corpus and websites from Outer and Expanding Circle country domains. We also evaluated potential causes of variation, investigating differences between Outer and Expanding Circles and the contribution of substrate influence. Our data show notable and widespread countable use of nouns that are generally non-count in Inner Circle Englishes, but such usage is highly infrequent overall. There appears to be greater variation in the Outer than the Expanding Circle, but little evidence of a determining role for substrate influence. We conclude that the prominence given to countability as a marker of ‘nativeness’ and ‘non-nativeness’ is unhelpful, in both the prescriptive context of TESOL and the descriptive contexts of world Englishes and English as a Lingua Franca. We advocate the use of web-based corpora to investigate lexico-grammatical variation in lingua franca usage and to reveal the ‘plurilithic’ nature of English.

Definite article usage across varieties of English

Abstract: This paper seeks to explore the extent of definite article usage variation in several varieties of English based on a classification of its usage types. An annotation scheme based on Hawkins and Prince was developed for this purpose. Using matching corpus data representing Inner Circle varieties and Outer Circle varieties, analysis was made on approximately 14,000 tokens of the in private dialogue, academic writing and reportage. It was found that the different percentages of usage types in the three registers across the varieties were statistically significant. However there was no clear trend that could be observed in either group. The trends of the varieties, collectively or individually, were so unpredictable that in the end there was no evidence of an overall trend. Register, consistent with Biber et al.'s claim, was instead found to be a better predictor of the usage types of the in the varieties. The classification of the varieties as either Inner or Outer Circle was therefore shown to be less influential in the quantitative variation of the morpheme than previously thought. Nevertheless, a subsequent qualitative analysis showed that the structural and situational categories in the Outer Circle did contain a number of marked usages of the, presenting themselves as the clearest cases of variation in the data.

Advanced Dublin English in Irish radio advertising

Abstract: In the late 1990s, Ireland's increased prosperity and elevated international position created a need among ‘socially-mobile’ speakers in the capital, Dublin, for a less local and more sophisticated form of Irish English. This sparked the development of a new form of pronunciation which differentiated and distanced itself from local Dublin speech forms. This form has spread at a rapid pace, not only in Dublin, but throughout southern Ireland and has been given the term new pronunciation (Hickey 2004b:48), and more recently, advanced Dublin English (Hickey 2012). Since this new pronunciation form is seen by Hickey (2005) as indisputably the most important case of language change in contemporary Ireland, the extent to which it is reflected in and exploited in the Irish advertising context demands attention. This paper outlines research into the extent and functions of advanced Dublin English in Irish advertising through a quantitative and qualitative analysis of a corpus of 160 radio advertisements from a prominent Irish radio station. Following Lee (1992), Sussex's (1989) categorisation of the Action (associated with dialogic interaction in particular contexts) and comment (associated with slogan or voice of authority) components of the ads are employed.

Verbal hygiene in the Hong Kong gay community

Abstract: This paper explores the status and function of English among gay men in Hong Kong through the analysis of postings about English on a popular gay internet forum. The forum, gayhk.com, while mainly featuring discussions about sex, fashion, entertainment and relationships, also contains a surprising amount of discussion about the English language, mostly taking the form of what Cameron refers to as ‘verbal hygiene’ – the enforcement of language ‘standards’ through the criticism of the language use of particular individuals or groups. The analysis of these postings sees them not just as evidence of language attitudes within the gay community, but also as tools with which Chinese gay men in postcolonial Hong Kong position themselves in relation to one another, in relation to ‘foreign’ gay men, and in relation to the wider population of Hong Kong.

‘Locally acquired foreign accent’ (LAFA) in contemporary Ghana

Abstract: The term‘LAFA’ stands for ‘locally acquired foreign accent’ and refers to a style of speech popularly known in Ghana as ‘slurring’. It emerged in the 1990s, as a mainly phonological approximation to American speech, among young Ghanaians who may have never been to the US. The ‘target’ variety for English in the Ghanaian education system remains, as a colonial legacy, officially although not always in practice, British English. This paper reports a small-scale study of often ambivalent attitudes towards LAFA, among tertiary level students, and as observed on public websites. The analysis situates LAFA within a theoretical framework of identity construction through linguistic choices. By using LAFA, speakers bid for membership of an imagined global community. However, they also flout essentialised expectations of their speech, apparently rejecting aspects of their linguistic repertoire acquired in earlier life. The benefits LAFA users aspire to are thus accompanied by some risk of social rejection and accusations of fakery.

The use of Singlish in the teaching of Islam

Abstract: Singlish is used in many ways in the Islamic classroom in Singapore. Singlish softens the effect of introducing English instead of Malay and Arabic as the medium of instruction, helps the teacher to evoke camaraderie and fellowship, and is a means of scaffolding. It can be used to signal a change of footing, to attend to latecomers in a less threatening way, to humanize, to solicit students’ contribution, and to negotiate task instructions; in brief to generate a warmer, friendlier atmosphere all round. The data for this paper is organized under four themes: the use of I (international) and L (local) Englishes, the use of L Englishes together with L Malay, the simultaneous use of both L and I forms of English, Malay and Arabic; and last but not least, the style-switching between I and L Malay, an activity which parallels the style-switching observed between I and L English.

World Englishes in world religions

Abstract: In the beginning was the Word. Often quoted, these opening words from the Gospel according to John nonetheless show that the relationship between language and religion goes beyond intimacy to identity. Whether this is taken as a specific moment in the theorization of one religion, the culmination of a particular line of thinking, or a more general truth about how humans grasp the essence of their existence, it is clear that language and religion depend on one another in both immediate and profound ways. To put it another way, linguists, philosophers, and theologians have a lot to talk about. How doeslanguagemediateourconceptionoftheworld,ofwhatistrueoressential?Islanguage areliableguidetotheworld?Howdoesitunderpinbelief?Howdoesitenableacommunity to constitute itself in terms of shared beliefs? What do these beliefs require of language, and what does language require of these beliefs? Even the terms by which I frame these simple questions have been debated for centuries, and one hesitates to rush into the debate. Yet it is possible to say that, various religious and philosophical traditions have evolved according to particular views of language. Language needs to adopt particular forms and to be used in particular ways in order to serve the needs of individual religions. Sociolinguists will be interested in how language variation aligns with religion. How does the use of a language in a religious context bring about change in the language? How does it reveal or make use of language variation? What are the properties of religion as a sociolinguistic domain? What language ideologies do participants adhere to? Inthecourseofitsself-definitionasafieldofstudy,linguisticsandevensociolinguistics may have for the most part left the domain of religion to the anthropologists, philosophers, and theologians. The obvious exception is the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, but the reception of this idea has been contentious within the field. It may be that religious language is seen as the prototype for highly standardized, writing-centred, and prescriptive language use, and would not appear to be a fruitful field for new approaches interested in the primacy of speech, and variation within the community. The growth of linguistics within the academic world came at a time when traditional religions were undergoing extensive restructuring and even decline in many English-speaking societies, especially in the Inner Circle. However, as sociolinguistics developed, attention was bound to come round to religion among other social domains. Within the field of world Englishes specifically, the Kachruvian conceptualization created a space for new ways of thinking about English as a world language. Understanding how English is nativized, or adapted by speakers to the uses and needs of immediate contexts across the globe, involves culture as part of those contexts. Culture, in turn, often

The impact of call centre employment on women in India

Abstract: The market for global business process outsourcing (BPO) is predicted to triple in size by 2020 (NASSCOM 2012). Such explosive growth has had and will continue to have huge economic benefits for Asia. The benefits are clearly manifest in India and the Philippines, who are both leading offshore outsourcing (O&O) destinations for the BPO industry. In India, this development has resulted in an initiative to increase the number of women in the BPO workforce by a staggering 50 per cent. The implications of such a huge push has tremendous social impact, yet little is known about the BPO industry and the role of language in these O&O destinations. The present paper focuses on the impact of English and the role of women in this global workforce by addressing the following question: ‘What is the impact of the BPO industry, and specifically call centre employment, on women in India?’ Drawing on data collected through interviews, the findings show that women's lives have changed in a number of different ways. Informants reported experiencing greater freedom, financial independence and other significant changes. The findings provide a lucid representation of the role of English language in globalisation within the BPO industry in Asia.

Televised political discourse in New Zealand

Abstract: The world Englishes approach to discourse analysis has extended our understanding of the ways in which socio-pragmatic norms may be expressed in various varieties of English. In this vein, this paper addresses relational practices in New Zealand English and their impact on language use. While relational strategies have been linked to politeness devices and mitigation strategies, this paper identifies a range of relational practices that appear to be distinctive in the New Zealand context. The frequency of relational strategies and the amount of communicative effort interactants invest is evidence for an underlying wish for harmony and conflict avoidance that often typifies spoken New Zealand English interactions. An understanding of the social motivations underpinning such interactions may thus broaden our understanding of New Zealand English patterns of discourse, with particular reference to spoken interactions in the public arena.

Language choice in multilingual socio‐religious settings in southwest Cameroon

Abstract: This paper examines the factors motivating language choice in church in two semi-urban, multilingual localities of Anglophone Cameroon, namely, Kumba and Mundemba. The informants were priests, catechists, choir leaders and parishioners; and the data were collected through participant observation and a questionnaire. The structural-functional model proposed by Kouega (2008) was adopted. The findings revealed amongst other facts, that the languages used in these two places were English, Pidgin English, Latin, Lingala and Lamnso’ and those used in one or the other locality were Oroko and Bamileke. These languages were found to be chosen for one or more of the following reasons: the priests were proficient in them, the parishioners understood them, there were religious materials available in them, there were choirs singing in them and, lastly, there existed a collection of captivating lyrics in them.

International communication in a technology services call centre in India

Abstract: The data for this study was gathered from a US multinational company information technology enabled services (ITES) worksite offshored to India. The focus of the study is the exploration of the nature of English communication between professional support engineers across ‘Inner, Outer and Expanding Circles,’ and in particular the use of accommodation strategies used by the support engineers in the process of getting their professional work done on the phones with colleagues from all over the world. To date, little research into the needs and nature of English communication has been completed in this important industry in offshored destinations such as the Philippines and India. Such Outer Circle destinations are increasingly being selected by multinationals for offshoring and outsourcing due to the perception that these societies speak good English. But what does good English mean in globalized settings?

The language of Hinduism in the US diaspora

Abstract: The use of English in rituals in the Hindu diaspora in the US is a major change for the religion, since English is excluded from Hindu rituals in India. This paper demonstrates that: (a) this change has impacted the structure of English and the system of Hinduism; (b) Hindu saints, the ‘authority’ in Hinduism, sanction this change; (c) the media further promotes it; and (d) it impacts the degree of functional load and transparency for the languages of rituals while creating di-systems, or mixed codes with two systems of thought. The implications of this discussion for the theory of language change, maintenance and loss of language will be presented.

Was/were alternation in Shetland English

Abstract: Dialect use in Shetland's main town, Lerwick, demonstrates substantial interspeaker variability in the youngest generation, with some young speakers never using dialect features and some using them at rates similar to older generations. Such extreme interspeaker variability may be a harbinger of a complete shift to standardized varieties of English in subsequent generations as was suggested by Dorian in her research on Gaelic-speaking communities. This paper attempts to examine the extent to which these predictions are accurate, by focussing on a set of features (was/were variation) which began shifting towards standardized English in the middle aged generation. This makes it possible to concretely gauge what the effects of considerable interspeaker variability are on subsequent generations. The separate, yet linked, distribution of the features studied also makes it possible to examine constant rate effects more closely.

English and Cantonese in a bilingual call centre in Hong Kong

Abstract: With the rapid development of telecommunications and the business processing outsourcing (BPO) industry, many companies are establishing call centres for customer service in developing countries, where English is the major language used in the industry but often not spoken as the first language. While there is an abundance of research on call centre communication from the perspectives of business and management, sociolinguistics and applied linguistics, there is still a dearth of information about the use of English in the BPO industry with the coexistence of other languages. This paper presents a comparative study on the use of English and Cantonese in call centre communication conducted in an international healthcare insurance organisation in Hong Kong. English and Cantonese calls with apparent conflicts were transcribed and analysed in terms of how customer service representatives (CSRs) respond to complaints, and how customers enact their negative emotions while complaining.