Indian English Evolution and Focusing Visible Through Power Laws

Vineeta Chand,Shantanu Sur,Sumona Mondal,Devin Kapper,Rana Parshad

doi:10.3390/languages2040026

Vineeta Chand, Shantanu Sur + Show 3 more

Open Access

https://doi.org/10.3390/languages2040026

Copy DOI

Abstract

New dialect emergence and focusing in language contact settings is difficult to capture and date in terms of global structural dialect stabilization. This paper explores whether diachronic power law frequency distributions can provide evidence of dialect evolution and new dialect focusing, by considering the quantitative frequency characteristics of three diachronic Indian English (IE) corpora (1970s–2008). The results demonstrate that IE consistently follows power law frequency distributions and the corpora are each best fit by Mandelbrot’s Law. Diachronic changes in the constants are interpreted as evidence of lexical and syntactic collocational focusing within the process of new dialect formation. Evidence of new dialect focusing is also visible through apparent time comparison of spoken and written data. Age and gender-separated sub-corpora of the most recent corpus show minimal deviation, providing apparent time evidence for emerging IE dialect stability. From these findings, we extend the interpretation of diachronic changes in the β coefficient—as indicative of changes in the degree of synthetic/analytic structure—so that β is also sensitive to grammaticalization and changes in collocational patterns.

Highlights

Some English varieties are unambiguously considered different ‘dialects’: in settings with a sustained history of institutional and home monolingual English use, e.g., the UK, North America, Australia, New Zealand, and South Africa, regional variation is attributed to distinct historic patterns of language contact [1]
Responding to our broader research agenda, to explore World English (WE) evolution through frequency distributions, we discuss how these real and apparent time comparisons of frequency distributions relate to new dialect formation, focusing, and stabilization within the context of language contact evolution
We found that Indian English (IE) does follow power law frequency distributions, based on three different corpora and considering both spoken and written language

Summary

Introduction

Some English varieties are unambiguously considered different ‘dialects’: in settings with a sustained history of institutional and home monolingual English use, e.g., the UK, North America, Australia, New Zealand, and South Africa, regional variation is attributed to distinct historic patterns of language contact [1]. English varieties—American English and British Received Pronunciation—these WE settings and the resultant localized English patterns often have a much higher proportion of non-native (L2) speakers compared to canonical English ecologies in North America, the UK, and southern hemispheric majority. The status of WEs as distinct dialects of English continues to be contentious, in large part because of their historic or continued majority L2 populations. This debate is political, rooted in negotiations over the commodification of English(es)—and within that the (de)valuing of some forms of English, L2 and bilingual speakers of English, and non-monolingual English acquisition pathways [5,6]

Objectives

Methods

Results

Discussion

Conclusion