Postcolonial Englishes Research Articles

Particle Placement in Hong Kong English: Independence from Great Britain as a Trigger of Structural Change?

In the framework of postcolonial Englishes and their evolutions, Hong Kong English represents an extraordinary case in that the political independence of Hong Kong from the British in 1997 did not result—as in most other cases—in a self-governing political body, but a formal re-integration of Hong Kong into China. As the handover of Hong Kong also marks a drastic linguistic re-orientation, this short-term diachronic paper studies newspaper data from before and after the 1997 handover. With a view to the structural object of investigation, particle placement, the exploration of relevant predictors and their effects in Hong Kong English sheds light on whether and, if so, how the end of British colonial rule has left linguistic traces in particle-placement choices. Using a sample of 322 particle verbs extracted from the South China Morning Post Corpus (SCMPC) and employing random forests, the study reports that pre- and post-handover constructional choices of particle placement are largely compatible with one another. Said choices are mainly guided by principles related to cognition and eurhythmy that—at least in the period observed—appear unlikely to be affected fundamentally by language-external political change.

Prejudice towards regional accents of Philippine English

Abstract This study examines linguistic prejudice towards the accents of three regional varieties of Philippine English: Cebuano English, Ilocano English, and Tagalog English. Data were collected using a verbal-guise technique taken by 982 listener-judges, who were selected using a purposive sampling technique. Results showed an overall more favorable attitude towards Tagalog English. Cebuano English and Ilocano English speakers were judged as less socially attractive and less competent compared to their Tagalog English counterparts. In the multilingual Philippines, where languages in the periphery, i.e. languages other than English and Tagalog, face negative stereotypes, the results indicate potential linguistic prejudice towards accents that individuals view as deviating from the standard, i.e. the Tagalog English accent as ‘the’ standard of Philippine English. The findings are discussed in light of the ongoing observation of the development of Philippine English in the Schneiderian model of postcolonial Englishes.

Linguistic and pragmatic ways of committing oneself

Abstract In this study I focus on the complementation patterns of commissive shell nouns in Ghanaian English (GhE). Commissive shell nouns are a type of illocutionary shell noun, i.e. a noun that encapsulates a content that is usually expressed in a complement or even separate clause or sentence thereby ascribing it an illocutionary force. I use the usage-based approach to the study of language and investigate the behavioral profile of these nouns in GhE. I apply descriptive statistics to data that have been collected from the Corpus of Global Web-based English (GloWbE). The study provides evidence for the characterization of GhE usage norms, and thus contributes to the scholarly knowledge on this variety of English. It also sheds light on the contribution that the meaning-related and ultimately cognitive perspective can offer in describing the complementation patterns of illocutionary nouns in Postcolonial Englishes (PCEs).

Focussing and Levelling in the Auckland Voices Project

Levelling and focussing are well-documented processes, central to the emergence of new dialects, including to the emergence of New Zealand English as a distinct variety in the last hundred and fifty years. We draw on recent recordings from three areas in Auckland to examine the extent to which levelling and focussing continue to be relevant today. Most work on NZ English as a new dialect has concentrated on phonology; we extend the analysis to syntax. We consider the structure of relative clauses used in communities which have very different demographic profiles and histories of immigration. We find evidence that levelling and focussing continue to underpin the development of post-colonial English in New Zealand. Our data suggests that speakers draw on linguistically motivated solutions to the choice among variants when focussing occurs.

The study of World Englishes: Impulses from beyond linguistics

The paper argues that, in view of the current boom in English as a Lingua Franca (ELF) and related developments of globalisation, research on English as a World Language should pay more attention to economic factors. Sociolinguistic models of postcolonial English which emphasise speakers’ desires to express new local identities as the driving force behind the ongoing differentiation of English remain valid, but should be refined through engaging with work on the political economy of language and language planning. The potential benefits of such dialogue across disciplinary boundaries are illustrated in two brief case studies on English in India and in sub-Saharan Africa (where the focus is on recent realignments in the traditional English and French zones of linguistic influence). The paper concludes that establishing English as the global lingua franca for a multilingual world and for multilingual speakers makes economic and political sense for the 21st century world. Multilingualism of the ‘English Plus X’ type should also be embraced by global citizens whose native language is English.

Recent Grammatical Change in Postcolonial Englishes: A Real-time Study of Genitive Variation in Caribbean and Indian News Writing

This paper presents a diachronic analysis of genitive variation in five varieties of English. Based on a set of matching newspaper corpora from the 1960s and the early 2000s from the Bahamas, Jamaica, India, Great Britain, and the U.S., we look into variation and change in the underlying grammar of the genitive alternation, as defined by patterns of constraints affecting the variable. We employ random forests and Multifactorial Prediction and Deviation Analysis to analyze a richly annotated set of over 22,000 genitive tokens. Our analysis corroborates findings with regard to postcolonial Englishes, particularly in the Caribbean, that suggest that these varieties are partaking in American-led global trends in grammar toward, e.g., densification, without actually approximating American norms. We also notice that production-related constraints on genitive variation, such as syntactic weight or givenness, have increased their effects. While metropolitan and postcolonial Englishes share a core grammar of genitive variation, there is noticeable variation particularly with regard to semantic and socioculturally determined predictors such as text type. Overall, we see a widening gap between metropolitan and postcolonial Englishes. The case of Bahamian English is especially interesting as it appears fairly American-oriented during colonial times but has aligned with other postcolonial Englishes since independence.

Nativization of English among L2 learners

In the discussion of Postcolonial Englishes, Cameroon English is a well-known variety, yet many of its features have not been fully described. One of these features is adverbs and their syntactic positioning. Hence, the present paper aims to show that the input-oriented feature specifications of adverbs and their syntactic positioning have undergone certain innovation processes in Cameroon English. These innovations include placement of adverbials to permit the SVAO information structure, employment of adjectives ending in -ly as adverbs, formation of adverbs from nouns by adding the suffix –ly, substitution of adjectives for adverbs, placement of adverbials after the verb in verb + long object clause, placement of an adverb modifying a participle after the word it modifies, and placement of adverbials of time between the subject and verb. The paper argues that the motivation behind novel adverbs as well as novel syntactic positioning of adverbs stems from the co-existence of English and many other languages in the linguistic ecology of Cameroon. The innovations can be codified into a variety-specific grammar of Cameroon English in its construction and semiotization of Cameroonians’ sense of socio-cultural and linguistic identity.

Intensifying and downtoning in South Asian Englishes

AbstractAs studies on socio-pragmatics in South Asian Englishes and – more generally – postcolonial Englishes are still rare, the present study analyses how age, formality of context, gender, topic of the conversation and type-token ratio of a given speaker influence intensifiers and downtoners in spoken Indian, Sri Lankan and British English as represented in theInternational Corpus of English. Central research interests cover (a) differences in the frequencies of intensifiers/downtoners regarding these factors and across the varieties studied and (b) variety-specific intensifiers/downtoners in these regional varieties. Two random forest analyses highlight that, while topic and type-token ratio are more important predictors than age and gender, all variables are – to different degrees – sensitive to variety. Possible explanations for a higher incidence of intensifiers/downtoners in British English than in Indian and Sri Lankan English include intensification strategies transferred from indigenous languages or high degrees of uncertainty avoidance in the South Asian speech communities.

The External-and-Internal-Forces Model applied to the Japan context

This article considers the Buschfeld-Kautzsch EIF (External and Internal Forces) model from the perspective of the Japan context. The model was developed as an enhancement to Schneiders Dynamic Model of Postcolonial Englishes, which is itself an enhancement of the Kachruvian World Englishes paradigm. The EIF is a flexible model that attempts to incorporate the linguistic, social, and historico-political development of English(es) in both postcolonial and non-postcolonial settings: thus addressing the main problem that variety development has heretofore not been systematically analyzed in Expanding Circle contexts. Hence our aim is to see if the EIF model can account for this development in Japan. We incorporate material and data from an eclectic range of historical and current sources. In the process, we consider the historical development of English in Japan from the Meiji Era to the present day, introduce the EIF model in some detail, and assess the usefulness of the model to help explain how English is growing and developing in Japan. The major findings of the article indicate that the EIF model is useful somewhat problematic, and only partly accounts for variety development of Japanese English. We conclude with some recommendations for improving the model through further testing, so it may become a more useful construct for identifying the process of ongoing variety development in non-postcolonial settings.

Backchannels and the pragmatics of South Asian Englishes

AbstractThe pragmatics of postcolonial Englishes including backchannels have so far remained in the periphery of academic inquiry. As pragmatic principles may be regarded as culture‐sensitive and various cultural differences have been attested between Great Britain and South Asia, the present paper studies backchannels in British, Indian and Sri Lankan English. Drawn from the respective spoken parts of the International Corpus of English, 3,212 backchannels are multifactorially modelled via a conditional inference tree and random forests including recent methodological improvements. Indications of pragmatic nativisation with backchannels are evident in Indian and Sri Lankan English with their distributions and forms in the light of various sociobiographic factors such as age and gender, but also type‐token ratio and conversational topic resonate with cultural differences across the speech communities. Lexical echo backchannels only attestable in the South Asian varieties instantiate a creative pragmatic innovation adding to the existing repertoire of backchannels in world Englishes.

Structural Nativization in Postcolonial Englishes

Structural nativization, that is, ‘the emergence of locally characteristic linguistic patterns and thus the genesis of a new variety of English’ (Schneider 2007: 5-6), is said to be especially prone to occur in the complementation profile of verbs (and adjectives) in Postcolonial Englishes (PCEs) (Schneider 2007: 86). However, recent research on complementation across PCEs using large corpora has focused mainly on the frequency distribution of standard patterns. This study aims to broaden the scope by conducting a corpus-based analysis using 12,000-token dataset drawn from The Corpus of Global Web-based English (GloWbE; Davies 2013) to identify possible innovative patterns in the complementation profile of remember. The varieties selected are the PCEs Indian, Bangladeshi and Sri Lankan Englishes, and British English as a reference variety. Following a holistic approach, the objective is not only to pinpoint possible instances of innovation but also explore the potential explanations of these. To do so, the complementation profile of the verb remember is considered from a diachronic perspective, mapping obsolete and regional complementation patterns and meanings (Visser 1963-1973; OED). Furthermore, the factors said to condition the linguistic evolution of PCEs are also discussed (Schneider 2007: 88-90, 99-10). The results show that there seem to be incipient traces, although very low in number, of non-standard complementation patterns in the varieties explored, both first and second language varieties. Moreover, the diachronic complementation profile of remember, plus the factors said to influence the development of PCEs, can be seen as potential explanations for most of the patterns found.

The Homogenization of Ethnic Differences in Singapore English? A Consonantal Production Study.

Past research on Singapore English (SgE) has shown that there are specific segmental and prosodic patterns that are unique to the three major ethnic groups, Chinese, Malay, and Indian in Singapore. These features have been highlighted as the "stereotypical" ethnic markers of SgE speakers, assuming substrate influence from the speakers' "ethnic" languages (Mandarin, Malay, and Tamil). However, recent research suggests that Singaporeans are becoming increasingly English dominant and has challenged the position of the ethnic languages as true "mother tongues" of Singaporeans. Hence, this study seeks to question if such "stereotypical" ethnic features exist, and if so, the extent to which a less dominant ethnic language would affect the phonology of speakers' English. This study looks specifically at the production of consonants /f/, /θ/, /t/, /v/, and /w/ as salient segmental features in SgE. Participants' phonetic behavior of /θ/, which was produced similarly across the three ethnic groups, disputed substrate influence. Tamil speakers were the most disparate, particularly with the /v/-/w/ contrast production. However, these deviations were often sporadic phonetic changes, which scarcely reflect robust speech patterns in the community. As a result, consonantal production in SgE is found to be largely independent of substrate influence and relatively uniform across the three ethnicities. The homogeneity observed in this study sheds light on bilinguals' acquisition of sounds, and it also provides phonological evidence toward the understanding of the evolutionary process of postcolonial Englishes.

Literary reflections of early postcolonial English in South Africa

AbstractAccording to Schneider's (2003, 2007) dynamic model of the evolution of postcolonial Englishes, the phase of endonormative stabilization is ‘reflected in the emergence of a new and vigorous cultural phenomenon, viz. literary creativity in English, rooted in the new culture and adopting elements of the new language variety’ (Schneider, 2007: 50). In the South African context, endonormative stabilization is dated as beginning with the advent of non‐racial democracy in South Africa (that is, in 1994), linked, according to Schneider (2017: 188), to ‘a broadly based and generally recognized literary creativity, spearheaded by two recent Nobel laureates: Nadine Gordimer in 1991 and J. M. Coetzee in 2003.’ In this paper, this conclusion is challenged by pointing to what Brink (1976: 42) refers to as a ‘vital and viable new literature’ in English which emerged in the first half of the 20th‐century and which often had a striking emphasis on the interrelationship between English and the Afrikaans IDG‐strand; thus constituting a form of postcolonial English which arose well before the examples mentioned by Schneider.

Finite and non‐finite complement clauses in postcolonial Englishes

AbstractThis paper explores the variability between finite and non‐finite complement clauses (CCs) after remember meaning ‘recall,’ looking at three postcolonial Englishes (PCEs), Indian, English and Sri Lankan Englishes, and British English as represented in the Corpus of Global Web‐based English (GloWbE). Taking a holistic approach, it examines the distribution and the potential language‐external and internal factors which may cause divergence between L1 and L2 varieties. Language‐external factors, such as innovation, language contact and second‐language (SLA) acquisition processes (Schneider, 2007: 88), appear to prompt the greater proportion of finite complement clauses found in the postcolonial Englishes, as expected based on the alleged tendency towards simplification of these varieties (Williams, 1987). However, the binary logistic regression analyses of language‐internal variables, largely related to the complexity principle (Rohdenburg, 1996, 2006), reveal that common language‐internal factors, apart from variety of English, also condition the choice of complement clause in the four varieties.

Automatic alignment for New Englishes: Applying state-of-the-art aligners to Trinidadian English.

While forced alignment has become an essential part of data processing in phonetic research, state-of-the-art aligners are often exclusively tailor-made for majority dialects, such as American English(es). This paper provides the first in-depth investigation into the reliability of popular pre-trained aligners in New Englishes-the nativized, postcolonial Englishes spoken world-wide. Using manually aligned data from Trinidadian English, the paper examines popular aligners [Forced Alignment and Vowel Extraction (FAVE), Munich Automatic Segmentation (MAUS), and the Montreal Forced Aligner (MFA)] and their performances in automatically segmenting Trinidadian speech. Results show that, first, only specific aligners (FAVE and MFA) can provide alignment that is comparable to that in the training varieties and, to a smaller degree, general human inter-rater uncertainty. Second, even well-performing aligners introduce bias toward their training varieties: the aligners systematically produce more erroneous alignments of Trinidadian English-specific vowels, for which they have no acoustic models. The findings suggest that phonetic research on New Englishes can benefit from pre-trained, state-of-the-art aligners, but that further manual data processing may generally be required to minimize errors in the analysis of non-majority dialect data.

Synchronic Variability in the Complementation Profile of REMEMBER: Finite vs Non-Finite Clauses in Indian and British English

This paper explores the prevalent simplification of morphosyntactic features occurring in Postcolonial Englishes (cf. e.g. Williams 1987) by addressing the hypothesis that finite complement clauses (CCs) should be more common in these varieties than a non-finite counterpart due to their higher explicitness. The hypothesis is tested in two varieties of English, British English as a reference variety and Indian English, exploring the complementation profile of REMEMBER by means of a corpus-based approach. In addition, a variable analysis aims at shedding light on the language-internal features potentially conditioning the choice between CCs in competition. The results partially confirm the hypothesis; there is a larger proportion of finite CCs in Indian English than in British English but non-finite CCs are the most common option in the two varieties. Furthermore, not only simplification, but also other factors such as substrate influence or second-language acquisition processes may be responsible for the distribution found in Indian English. As for language-internal features, while some factors condition the choice across varieties, others are variety-specific.

Representing the “Other”: Minority Discourse in the Postcolonial Indian English Novel

Through an analysis of the postcolonial fiction emanating from acts of violence unleashed in India during the anti-Sikh massacre of 1984, the demolition of the Babri Masjid in Ayodhya in 1992 and the explosion of violence in Gujarat in 2002, this essay examines how literary representation impacts communalism or religious minorities. It underscores the narrative strategies and techniques that fictional constructs use to articulate as well as to challenge the physical, emotional, and psychological dimensions of the marginalization and the exclusion of minorities in India. Emerging as a powerful and radical critique, these fictions can be read as counter-narratives or studies in resistance that interrogate and unravel the politics of suppression that governs nationalist discourses thereby challenging the secular underpinnings of the Indian nation-state.

Singaporean internet chit chat compared to informal spoken language*

AbstractThis paper compares data from a Singaporean chit chat forum to informal spoken data. We first perform a qualitative analysis of text samples in a framework of indexicality. Then we present quantitative findings for two (sets of) features each of the contact variety Singlish (particles, thekena-passive) and spoken English in general (discourse markers, contractions). For the former some similarities are observed but we also find that the forum contributors tend to be creative and innovative in their choice of particles. In this connection we argue that they index specific subgroup identities and further point out that Singlish is a rather flexible set of resources. Our findings differ from those of previous research on Jamaican Creole as used in an internet forum, thus showing that the use of contact varieties in computer-mediated communication can take different forms. The general features of spoken English are used comparatively less in the forum data, indicating that using Singlish features in writing is not tantamount to writing down spoken language. Moreover, we draw attention to features of computer-mediated communication in in the chit chat forum data. Finally we discuss implications in terms of the Dynamic Model of the evolution of Postcolonial Englishes (Schneider 2007).

Creative hybridity over linguistic purity: the status of English in the United Arab Emirates

Currently, the linguistic landscape in the United Arab Emirates (UAE) can be described as dynamic, complex and multifaceted. This article discusses the status of English in the UAE with three key periods of language change being identified, based on Schneider’s ‘dynamic model’ of postcolonial Englishes. The increasing impact of English as a lingua franca, and the recent shift towards English Medium Instruction at all levels of Emirati education are then explored before examining attitudes towards English with reference to the ‘Englishization vs. hybridization’ debate. It is argued that rather than English and Arabic being used in a binary way representing linguistic purity, the UAE’s linguistic landscape is more complex and dynamic. Emiratis are increasingly using multiple forms of linguistic hybridity such as ‘white dialects’, ‘Arabizi’, ‘translanguaging’ and ‘code-switching’, which are reshaping Emirati language use and additionally influencing local identities.

Settler Colonial Englishes Are Distinct from Postcolonial Englishes

Settler Colonial Englishes Are Distinct from Postcolonial Englishes