Standard Varieties Of English Research Articles

Development of The English Language in Parallel with the Changing Socio-Cultural Trends in India

This paper explores several political and historical events intersected with concepts from sociology to examine the growth and development of the English language in India during the pre-Independence and after independence eras. This development is viewed in parallel with the changing societal setup by utilising concepts like westernisation and modernisation that helped facilitate education and promote social equality among the people by shrinking the persisting barrier of caste system to a profound extent and diminishing the role of indigenous concepts of social upliftment like Sanskritisation. After foreseeing the number of speakers of English that gives rise to the standard variety of English in India, i.e., Indian English, its potential in a socio-cultural context, and the interest among subsequent learners of the language, the paper concludes that the growth prospects for English appear to be vital, and it will continue to emerge as an essential language in the coming generations in India.

WEYand the structure of relative clauses in Nigerian Pidgin English

AbstractA comprehensive corpus-driven account of the internal structure, meaning and interpretation of relative clauses in Nigerian Pidgin English (NPE) is missing in the literature. Relativisation, including its process, strategies, constraints, structural patterning, meaning and interpretation, is an important syntactic structure in any language, and therefore is crucial to our understanding of the extent to which syntactic and semantic structures in NPE differ from standard varieties of English. Relying on corpus material extracted from a popular web media outlet BBC News Pidgin, the study shows that user/speakers of NPE are cognitively enabled and creative in varying relative clauses along simple and complex choices and that structural and semantic complexities operative in the relativisation process in NPE are not too different from standard Englishes. Unlike in standard English where relativiserswhoandwhichclearly relate to the animacy of the relativised NP, relativiser representingwey, which can be classified as a prototype for relativisersweh,wen, andwia, does not clearly make such distinction. Also, it is shown thatweyembodies the syntactic and semantic properties of these other relativisers, a phenomenon classified asrelativiser reduction.

Context matters

Abstract This paper presents the results of two largely parallel verbal guise studies that elicited students’ attitudes toward different standard varieties of English. The studies were conducted in the small anglophone Caribbean island country of Grenada. The two studies were contextualized in the domains of education and newscasting, respectively, with the aim of finding out how language attitudes are influenced by context in societies where different endo- and exonormative standards are of relevance. As hypothesized, the results revealed strong differences between the evaluations of speakers of the two domains and confirm that contextualization is crucial in language attitude research. Against previous hypotheses, however, the acceptance of endonormative standard accents was stronger in the more globally open context of newscasting than in the more locally restricted domain of education. The results are discussed against the background of the sociolinguistic situation in Grenada and inform on endonormativity and norm orientation in one of the underresearched island countries of the anglophone Caribbean.

English Language Learners, Labels, Purposes, Standard English, Whiteness, Deficit Views, and Unproblematic Framings: Toward Southern Decoloniality

This paper argues for revisiting ways in which English Language Learners (ELLs), and the learner labels attributed to them, are negatively, racially, and pathologically framed and constructed based on, putatively, their English language competence, or their lack of it. It contends that this framing tends to give rise to a raciolinguistic profiling of these learners, as they end up being classified by their race, pan-ethnicity, nationality, immigrant/refugee status, regionality, and at times, by their skin color, in addition to their language abilities. This raciolinguistic framing often engenders other framings such as White, deficit, and poverty framings, and sub-framings like an othering framing (e.g., the racial others and the linguistic others). These framings, together with the normative ways in which ELLs’ language problems are constructed, have been characterized in this paper as misframings. Additionally, employing southern decoloniality, the paper problematizes and critiques the way ELLs are constructed and labeled, and the appropriation of Standard English (SE) as the sole touchstone of acceptable English in the midst of the other varieties of SE and of pluriversal speakers of English. Finally, the paper calls for the provincialization/localization or the deparochialization of English in keeping with its southern decolonial approach.

Which English Should We Stand For? Voices from Lecturers in Thai Multicultural Universities

The rapid transformation of English linguistic landscapes has introduced the world to newly emerging English varieties or World Englishes, which are not typically employed in the Inner Circle. To address the defying phenomenon, this qualitative study explored the perceptions of Thai university lecturers on World Englishes, Thai English and the feasibility of implementing World Englishes and Thai English in the classrooms. Data were collected from semi-structured interviews with 15 English lecturers in 5 universities across the Thai regions. Analyzed by content analysis, findings revealed that the participants demonstrated mixed perceptions. While most of the participants viewed British and American Englishes as representations of standard English varieties and questioned the legitimacy of World Englishes and Thai English, others reportedly recognized and accepted the existence of World Englishes and considered Thai English as a tool to convey Thai identities and cultures. The findings also indicated that most participants outright disapproved of World Englishes and Thai English in teaching practices, and these varieties were substantially marginalized and devalued. However, to prepare learners for realistic use of English and increase their awareness of World Englishes and Thai English, the remaining participants suggested that English language teaching should embrace flexible linguistic conventions that allow spaces for Inner Circle, Outer Circle and Expanding Circle Englishes.

Repositioning Singlish in Singapore’s language-in-education policies

ABSTRACT Singapore’s language-in-education policies have always prescribed that only a standard variety of English be allowed in teaching and learning. This view of upholding a standard has been pervasive not only in education but also throughout Singapore’s society. In this article, we review Singapore’s language policy, emphasizing the functional polarization of languages ideology that serves as its basis, and discuss the resultant natural emergence of the key linguistic marker of Singaporean national identity – Singlish. Charting the journey and growth of Singlish’s role and status from both official and socio-cultural perspectives, we highlight that changes can be observed. It is, thus, imperative that Singlish’s place in language classrooms and the affordances that Singlish has for language learning be reconsidered. Following a discussion of salient Singlish features, highlighting their appropriacy in social situations where standard English features are not and the fact that many Singapore English features are recognizably shared by both Singlish and Singapore Standard English, we propose a linguistic feature-based contrastive analysis approach for Singapore’s English language classrooms. At the core, we call for a review of Singapore’s language-in-education policies and the support of various stakeholders in the bid to nurture confident and effective English language users of the future.

RP English Vowel and Consonant Changes in the Brummies' English Accent

This study aims to investigate consonant and vowel changes in the Brummie accent as compared with the ones in the standard variety of English through a comparative descriptive study. The investigation is based on an audio recording conversation and an extract of a TV show film; in addition to a questionnaire administered to 40 second year students of Master degree of linguistics from the English section of Ibn Khaldoun University, after they have been exposed to both the audio recording and the film extract. This is to gather information about their attitudes towards the aforementioned changes’ effects. Thefindings of the current study reveal the existence of great alterations in the articulation of vowel and consonant sounds in Brummie accent, which may differ from the norms that govern the standard variety of English. The outcomes of the audio recording and video extract as well as the gathered data from students’ questionnaire point out negative effects on learners’ clear perception of Brummie accent, which will undoubtedly lead to their fear of confronting serious communication problems when talking with UK citizens.

Identification of English vowels by non-native listeners: Effects of listeners’ experience of the target dialect and talkers’ language background

This study investigates how second language (L2) listeners’ perception is affected by two factors: the listeners’ experience with the target dialect – North American English (NAE) vs. Standard Southern British English (SSBE) – and talkers’ language background: native vs. non-native talkers; i.e. interlanguage speech intelligibility benefit (ISIB) talker effects. Two groups of native-Korean-speaking listeners with different target English dialects – L1-Korean listeners of English as a second language (ESL) in the USA and L1-Korean ESL listeners in the UK – were tested on the identification of 12 English vowels spoken by native and non-native (L1-Korean) talkers of NAE and SSBE. The results show that the L2 listeners’ experience with the target dialect had a significant impact on the accuracy of their identification of the L2 vowels. However, no ISIB-talker effects were observed for the L1-Korean listener groups regardless of the listeners’ differences in experience with the two varieties of English. The study adds to the L2 sound acquisition literature and the ISIB literature by looking into L2 learners’ identification of L2 vowels, taking into account the learners’ differences in experience with two standard varieties of English (NAE and SSBE) and the interaction between the learners’ experience with the two varieties and ISIB-talker effects. It also sheds some light on the issue of adult L2 learners’ ability to learn the vowels of a new target variety.

What did Joseph Wright mean by meaning

EDD Online, the online version of Joseph Wright’s English Dialect Dictionary, was completed by a project team at the University of Innsbruck in 2019. The sophisticated search-engine of the new interface 3.0 reveals the multi-faceted role of semantics in dialect words. Its complexity is due to both the fuzziness of lexical forms and the ambiguity of their meanings. This paper, beyond the theory-biased “complexity debate”, supports the opinion that traditional regional dialects, qua low-contact varieties, have developed a higher degree of lexical complexity than high-contact varieties, i.e. pidgins and creoles, and, in terms of word formation, than the Standard variety of English. The paper first discusses the often polysemous or homophonous meanings of headwords, then of strings within word compositions and phrases. The lemmas also sometimes turn out to be (bound) morphemes or variants. A major aspect in this paper is the wealth of figurative meanings in dialect. This is simply due to the essential role of iconicity, that is, a result of the fact that dialect speakers (“people”) want to “see” in their minds what they mean.

English comparative correlative constructions: A usage-based account

AbstractEnglish Comparative Correlatives (CCs) consist of two clauses, C1 and C2:[The more we get together,]C1[the happier we’ll be.]C2Recently, large corpus studies based on the Corpus of Contemporary American English have unearthed various meso-constructions in English CCs using covarying–collexeme analysis. The present study tests these findings against data from the British National Corpus (BNC), aiming to replicate previous results against data from another standard variety of English (British English) and a corpus that is sampled from a wider range of registers. Over 2,000 CC tokens from the BNC were analyzed with regard to hypotactic features, filler types encountered as comparative elements, and deletion phenomena. Moreover, in contrast to earlier corpus studies (such as Hoffmann, Thomas, Jakob Horsch, and Thomas Brunner. 2019. “The more data, the better: a usage-based account of the English comparative correlative construction.” Cognitive Linguistics30(1): 1–36), the present study also investigates the frequency of the semantically related C2C1 construction (You will be the happierC2,the more we get togetherC1) that previously has been found to be considerably less frequent than its counterpart. The results of the present analysis confirm that English CCs possess more paratactic than hypotactic features and, supporting most of the findings of Hoffmann, Horsch, and Brunner (2019) provide even stronger evidence for the existence of several symmetric meso-constructions.

Questioning the Position of SBS As the Model Variety for Serbian EFL Students

This paper primarily investigates the attitude of Serbian EFL students, in their 4th and 5th year of university studies, towards the Southern British Standard variety of English, as well as its position in comparison with General American (GA) and Standard Australian English. The aim of this study is to determine whether SBS still remains the preferred model variety in Serbia, as well as to simultaneously investigate if a hierarchy also exists among standard varieties of English. The participants completed a questionnaire that combined the matched-guise technique with the Likert-scale and a series of open-ended questions. The questions cover the identification of one of the three varieties of English, assessment of model speakers’ traits classified into social status and social closeness. Results show that, overall, EFL students react more positively to GA and SBS. However, this paper reports some unexpected results − SBS ranks the highest not only in terms of prestige, but also social closeness. This finding diverges from previous research and implies that, although GA might be more present in production with this group of EFL students, SBS still holds the position of the primary model variety, whose dominance also extends to social attractiveness.

Willingness to communicate from an English as an International Language (EIL) perspective: The case of Macau

The study was conducted in Macau, a sociolinguistically diverse context with sixty-two first-year and second-year university students. Semi-structured interview was used as an instrument for data collection for this exploratory study. The students were asked questions regarding their willingness to communicate (WTC) using different varieties of English in face-to-face communication and communication in the social media contexts. The results indicate that the participants are aware of the status of English as an international language and can identify the different English varieties in Kachru’s (1986) concentric circles. The participants have reported a high willingness to communicate in two standard English varieties; that is, American English and British English for face-to-face communication and social media contexts. The study has also revealed an emergence of the Chinese variety of English in that the participants hold a positive attitude towards Chinese English and are willing to use it in monolingual classrooms and in the case of out-of-class events in which the speakers share the first language and culture that Chinese English is used.

Revisiting the ‘E’ in EMI: students’ perceptions of standard English, lingua franca and translingual practices

ABSTRACTConceptualizations of English as standard, as a lingua franca, or as part of translingual practice form part of the discourses surrounding its use in EMI. While researchers generally agree that the ‘E’ in EMI should not stand for native varieties of standard English, the stakeholders’ perceptions of English call for further research. This paper addresses this gap by examining students’ conceptualizations of English in an EMI programme at a Swedish university. Drawing on interview data collected from local and international students, the analysis focuses on students’ conceptualizations of English in connection to their positionings. The analysis shows that all three above-mentioned conceptualizations are present. The tensions in the students’ conceptualizations of English and positionings point towards issues related to power relations, group dynamics, social integration, and learning. The analysis shows that translingual practices in EMI contexts are not always associated with empowering the students by allowing them to resort to their L1s to fill gaps in their English. Translanguaging can also function as a mechanism of exclusion and reinforcement of language standards by a group of ‘elite’ translinguals. The idea of what is acceptable English in EMI is not static and can move along the standard – non-standard continuum.

Saudi Students’ Attitude towards World Englishes

In order to create and adopt better educational and pedagogic policies, it is important to understand students’ attitude towards the varieties of English. This study aims to investigate young Saudi EFL learners’ attitude towards the concept of World Englishes. It also explores Saudi learners’ preference of one English variety over the others. This study is significant since few studies have been done on the awareness of World Englishes among Saudi EFL learners and the present research is designed to fill this gap. The present study will help apply the concept of World Englishes to the teaching of English language in a sample Saudi educational environment. In addition, it will help develop a positive attitude towards cultural understanding and cultural diversity in Saudi Arabia. This study has three objectives: to examine and understand how EFL learners see World Englishes, and varieties of English as a second language in particular, in the Saudi Arabian context; to find out how Saudi EFL learners view the apparent domination of one variety of English over others; and to investigate the reasons why one variety of English is preferred to others. The study uses both direct and indirect techniques of measuring the attitude through interviews and a questionnaire. The questionnaire contained both open-ended and close-ended questions, one of which was a verbal guise test. The samples were obtained from the two largest public educational institutes in Saudi Arabia with both male and female adult students.The findings indicate that Saudi students are aware of some varieties of the English language, though they seem to have varied attitudes towards the diverse varieties of World Englishes. Students generally viewed American and British English as the standard English varieties and did not accept other varieties of World Englishes as standard. The results also showed that in spite of the fact that most of the students generally considered a ‘native’ teacher’s English as superior, they principally favored a Saudi teacher to teach them.

African Englishes and creative writing

ABSTRACTThis study considers a number of questions regarding the structural characteristics of African Englishes exemplified in African creative writing, with a focus on such leading novelists as Achebe, Ngugi, Nwapa, and Okara. It explores the degree to which these writers reconstruct the English language in their writings to convey the African cultures represented in their works. A related issue is whether these texts demonstrate ‘trans‐creations’ that still adhere to the standard varieties of English with appropriately encoded and limited Africanisms to capture African cultures. Another crucially important issue is whether the extensive use of English is detrimental to the vitality and creativity of African languages.

Voices from stakeholders: What makes an academic English test ‘international’?

Recent years have witnessed a growing number of speakers of all varieties of English in English-medium higher education. It has also become increasingly common for an academic English test to be used and accepted in multiple countries for admissions purposes. Both trends have implications for the definition of the target language use domain for tests of English for academic purposes, and have brought challenges to traditional test development practices based on one of the Standard varieties of English. In this study we investigated what properties a global academic English test should include from the perspectives of multiple stakeholder groups, including test takers, English teachers, score users, and language testing professionals. Survey responses from the participants indicated both willingness to embrace diversity and reservations about accommodating differences. Further analysis by stakeholder indicated that perceptions varied to a certain extent across stakeholder groups. The results also indicated that various factors were recognized as contributing to an academic test's global perception. The findings contribute to our understanding of assessing academic English in the global context. The results can also inform the alignment of testing practices with the reality of English language use globally, which suggests implications for test development and delivery.

Teaching English-Yoruba Prosodies in Context: Connectivity in Disparity

The paper discusses a core feature that differentiates Nigerian English from other native Standard English varieties, namely the English prosodies of Stress-Rhythm-Intonation, in the light of the dominant L2 transfer feature of Nigerian spoken English’s Yoruba ‘tone-prominence’. Particular attention is given to Pitch which translates phonetically into Yoruba ‘Tones’. It discusses how the language use of popular street urchins in Lagos, Nigeria (popularly called ‘Area boys’) has been successfully used (among other registers) to teach the English prosodies of stress (embedding ‘pitch’), Rhythm and Intonation (also embedding ‘pitch’) in a multilingual but largely Yoruba L2 ‘tone-prominence’ speech community. A prosodic theoretical framework is adopted in the discussions and analysisof data, hitherto used in teaching a graduating class of B.A. English students who had been taught courses in English phonology throughout their four year course. It is argued that despite the disparity between the two language systems of Yoruba and English at the prosodic level, the language of ‘Lagos Area Boys’ creates some connectivity which the typical undergraduate student of English can identify with and which is used to successfully teach Pitch in particular, even though that language register is largely ‘tone-prominence’ based. Moving from the known to the unknown is always a useful teaching methodology and this approach has been employed here. Thus, an established connectivity in disparity can and indeed has, been used successfully within the Yoruba-English L2 language contact situation.

Korean EFL Learners’ Apologies with Implication for Interlanguage Pragmatics

The Journal of Studies in Language 29.2, 205-223. The role of the speech act of apologies is to maintain and restore the interpersonal relationship in all societies and the apology speech act can be realized in different patterns from culture to culture. Relying on the two means of data collection from 20 Korean EFL learners and 20 native English speakers, this study examines how the Korean EFL learners perform apology speech act depending on a social factor such as social distance and how their speech act of apologies differ from those of native speakers of Standard varieties of English. Results showed that both Korean EFL learns and native English speakers preferred an explicit apology the most. Compared to the native speakers, however, Korean EFL learners showed the over-reliance on the explicit apology strategy and underuse of the Upgrader. Pedagogical implications were made helping the EFL learners develop pragmatic competence for successful communication. (Kongju National UniversityㆍMokwon University)

Teaching a Standard Variety of English or a Local Standard: The Case of Cameroon

The linguistic and cultural legacies of British colonization include, among other things, the emergence of several varieties of English shaped by the social, ecological, cultural, historical, political and linguistic realities of the different places where the language was introduced. In postcolonial settings, the growth of new nations was inextricably bound with identity construction in the use of English, both as a symbol of independence from the colonial power and a marker of identity from other varieties of English. Looking at English language teaching and testing, however, that quest for identity is easily silenced; there is still a strong dominance of the standard language ideology, with British and American varieties providing norms for teachers all over the world. This paper investigates major controversies surrounding TESOL practice and highlights the dilemma faced by the non-native English teacher in the process of choosing a variety of English for the language classroom. Taking Cameroon as case study, the paper shows that it is not plausible to teach only one variety of English in that country, be it British, American or Cameroon English. While English multi-dialectalism in Cameroon requires exposing learners to many varieties of English, teachers can reach that goal by taking advantage of the linguistic creativity found in literary texts.

Towards endonormative standards of English in the Caribbean: a study of students' beliefs and school curricula

Like other former British colonies, Anglophone Caribbean countries like Trinidad & Tobago (T&T) and Jamaica are in a process of reorientation from Standard British English towards endonormative standards. This paper investigates the present stage in this process on the basis of a survey of students' beliefs about standard varieties of English. These were found to be rather mixed, indicating that the belief in an exonormative standard still lingers on while awareness of endonormative standards is gaining ground. School curricula are also examined. Primary school curricula in both T&T and Jamaica are found to include various aspects that, if fully implemented, should help raise awareness of the local nature and relevance of Standard English at an age-appropriate level. Jamaican curricula also explicitly recognise a national standard variety as the target, which is not the case in T&T's curricula, one reason probably being that the Jamaican standard has more linguistic research to support it. The regional advanced secondary curriculum covers major aspects of the language situation in the Anglophone Caribbean but national and regional aspects of Standard English could be addressed more explicitly.