Abstract
The present study investigates the representation of non-standardised varieties of English in literary prose texts. This is achieved by creating and annotating a corpus of literary texts from Scotland, West Africa, and Southeast Asia. The analysis addresses two major topics. Firstly, the extent of representation reveals clearly distinct feature profiles across regions, coupled with varying feature densities. Feature profiles are also relevant to individual characters, as certain traits such as social status, ethnicity, or age can be signalled by linguistic means. The second topic, accuracy of representation, compares the features observed in literary texts with descriptions of the actual varieties, and suggests that representations of varieties may differ from their real-life models in the sense that highly frequent features may be absent from texts, while less frequent but more emblematic ones, or even invented ones, may be used by authors to render a variety of English in their texts.
Highlights
The spread of English as a world language and the subsequent development of numerous varieties during the colonial and postcolonial periods have led to the emergence of local literatures that use local varieties of English
In spite of their “invented” nature, literary texts can serve as a data source to answer other linguistic questions, given that invented utterances ascribed to fictional characters rely on real-life models (Fowler 1989: 114) that the author recollects and adjusts
The present article addresses two major questions: (1) To what extent are non-standardised linguistic features represented in literary texts? The feature profiles resulting from this inquiry have further ramifications related to the types of linguistic features used, the frequency with which they are used, and which characters used them
Summary
These respellings are “phonologically unmotivated, giving the impression of non-standardness but not providing any linguistic detail” (Honeybone & Watson 2013: 313), which justifies the distinction between a category named ‘phonology’ as opposed to linguistically inconsequential respellings In addition to these main categories, relevant attributes are marked, which, depending on the feature category, can be the observed feature, the expected equivalent in a standardised variety, the meaning, and the language used; further, grammatical features possess an ‘ewave’ attribute which corresponds to the identification number for the feature in eWAVE, the Electronic World Atlas of Varieties of English (Kortmann & Lunkenheimer 2013). The ultimate data collection goal of the project is to diversify the number of countries per region, obtain comparable word counts for each decade for a study of diachronic developments, and reach a size of 100,00 words for each sub-corpus
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