If you come across people saying or writing things like these, you may well wonder who they are, what they are saying, and what language they are speaking:
- (from newspaper)
Health and environment him all big-fellow something all woman along country today he got big-fellow worry along him.
…which-one principal came here, she's just cheeky like the other one
- (from newspaper apropos Sonja
Gandhi)
What's more we should respect her for being a layak Indian bahu who stayed on to do her duty by her husband's family, she reared her children and instilled in them the best Indian values, she took care of her mother-in-law and husband's legacy. A: How come you borrow my shirt now got hole one?!
B: Borrow that time already like that, wut!
A: Then why you never say first?
B: You never ask, wut!- (ten year old child to another
child who said something in Igbo)
Tokam for inglish na, a no de hyar di ting we yu de tok.
There's a range of difference here, but all have a major component of what we call English. We might not call all of them New Englishes—(1) and (5) are from pidgins (at least originally)—but the others do illustrate the term. New/World/Global/Post Colonial Englishes have been developing and increasing in use in former colonies very rapidly and present new and unique challenges to how we think of languages and standards.
This is a course in language variation, and the core of our work will be collecting and analyzing samples of the different accents and texts produced by users of these New Englishes. We will explore Mesthrie and Bhatt's claim that New English departures from the standard in accent, grammar, vocabulary, discourse markers, and speech acts cluster rather closely together. That is, there are perhaps Angloversals. At the same time, we see "the standard (or standards)" and standardization in a new light. In addition to sharpening the analytic skills introduced in ENGL 370/ LINGS 200/400, we will learn to use the International Corpus of English corpora and corpora gathered from the Web. The course will function in effect as one in applied corpus linguistics. Though we concentrate on linguistic analysis, we will not forget that these New Englishes are emerging as means of serving the practical needs and expressive desires of very diverse groups whose forebears were colonial subjects of Great Britain or her former colony. Language Policy issues, however, are the central focus of a different course, English 478.
The basis of the grading is four assignments that will each bear 20% of the weight of the final grade. The first three will culminate individual sections of the course (on Phonetics/Phonology, Lexicon, and Syntax); the last will be a full analysis of a particular sample/text of a WE integrating the skills you will have acquired and will function in the place of a Final Exam.
The assignments are organized by topic and issues rather than country by country, but it will be helpful if each of you chooses a country with an emerging WE to track over the course of the quarter. The variant you choose to track need not be one of those in the ICE corpus—in fact, I would be happy if you chose Nigeria (.ng) or South Africa (.za) or other countries, though there are some tips to get started for the ICE languages. Generally in this course we will slight the Inner Circle WE's where English is spoken generally, as a first language, and monolingually, but if you really, really want to track Irish English, or Canadian, or Australian, you may do so. Just let me know.
Most of the software for the course is provided in the form of Web apps, but you might also find it convenient download a copy of the free concordancer program AntConc. There are versions for all the main platforms.
Schedule of Topics and Assignments
| Date | Readings | Topics |
|---|---|---|
| 29 Sept. | - - | Introduction: Scope of course One English, or Many? Acronyms: L1, L2, ENL, ESL, EFL, ELF A little transcription |
| 4 Oct. | A1, B1, D1 (& activities) | Spread and Contact; Phonetic alphabet RP Chart for English Accents BBC-Radio 4 BBC Learning English John Wells' Lexical Sets (with GenAm and RP) |
| 6 Oct. | MB: 1-27; 188-198 | English Language Complex World/New/Global/Postcolonial Englishes Practice transcribing GMU Speech Accent Archive International Dialects of English Archive |
| 11 Oct. | MB: 27-38; A3; Smith&Nelson article on Intelligibility | Models (the Circles etc.) Transcription practice |
| 13 Oct. | MB: 118-130; | Phonetics Project due |
| 18 Oct. | MB: 200-211; B3, C3, D3 | Quirk/Kachru debate |
| 20 Oct. | A2-D2; MB: 39-43 | Pidgins, Creoles, and Patois the creole continuum |
| 25 Oct. | Wikipedia: Nigerian Pidgin
Rendering a sermon in Pidgin Dagmar Deuber: "First Year of Nation's Return ..." White Man Speaking Pidgin |
Example: Nigerian pidgin |
| 27 Oct. | A4, B4; MB 109-118 | Variation across Outer Circle Lexical differences Using ICE-CWB |
| 1 Nov. | Bolton &Butler article on Lexicography//Philippine | Borrowing, standard, independence |
| 3 Nov | C4, D4 | Achebe/Thiongo exchange Singlish &Singapore English NEs and literature |
| 8 Nov. | A5-D5 | Questions and Issues of The Standard Speak Good English Movement Lexicon Project Due Priti Sandhu on Accent and Access in India |
| 10 Nov. | MB 39-58; | Structural Features:NP | ````
| 15 Nov. | Bautista article on gram. features of PE | Using ICE to study grammar |
| 17 Nov. | MB:58-77; | Structural Features: VP |
| 22 Nov. | Rogers article on syntactic features of IndEng | Genres; using WebCorp |
| 29 Nov. | MB: 78-96 | Structures: Cross Clausal Comp Project Due |
| 1 Dec | MB: 131-55 | Pragmatics&Discourse |
| 6 Dec. | A7-C7; Katchru &Nelson article on Code-mixing | code switching/mixing; Indian E, HK E, China E |
| 8 Dec. | A6-D6 | English as a Lingua Franca VOICE corpus of spoken ELF Final Projects Due |
Resources
General
-
- IPA Chart Pronounced or,
IPA Charts (Paul Meier) - IPA character picker
- ICE Sample Sound Files
- Accents of English from Around the World
- IDEA: International Dialects of English Archive
- Sounds Familiar? Accents and Dialects of the UK (British Library)
- Web Resources for African Languages: English and Related Pidgins and Creoles
- Overall, Wikipedia has good entries for most of the New Englishes
- Algeo, John, British or American English, (Cambridge, 2006) PE 1072 A44 2006 is a good place to check whether an apparent special feature of a World English is an innovation, or is found in British English.
- IPA Chart Pronounced or,
- Library (can be online)
- World Englishes
- English Today
- English World-Wide
- ICE corpora tagged and loaded into Corpus Work Bench Concordancer
Jamaica
- Audio for ICE-JA: S1A-002
- Jamaican Patois Patwa Dictionary (pronouncing)
- Jamaica Phrase Dictionary
- RadioStationWorld: Jamaica
- Some good YouTube "data" on attitudes toward the Patois in Jamaica group report
- Allsopp, Richard, ed. Dictionary of Caribbean English(2003) Reference: PE3304.D54 2003
- Cassidy, Frederic G. and R. B. LePage. Dictionary of Jamaican English (various editions: 1967 and later) PE 3313.25 C3 1980
Singapore
- Singapore Colloquial English (overview)
- The Lim Siew Hwee Corpus of Informal Singapore Speech and see also the NIE Corpus (less informal)
- Edinburgh pronunciation table
- The Coxford Singlish Dictionary
- Razor TV (Straits Times)
- 938 Live
- Speak Good English
- Deterding, David. Singapore English. Edinburgh University Press (2007) PE3502.S5 D48 2007
- Ling, Low Ee and Adam Brown. English in Singapore: An Introduction (2005) PE 3502.S5 L69 2005 [contrast of Singapore English and StdE]
- Lim, Lisa ed. Singapore English: a grammatical description (2004) PE33502.S5 S56 2004
Nigeria
India
- Edinburgh Accent Table
- All India Radio:News (audio)
- http://www.amritt.com/IndianEnglish.html
- Colloquial Indish Dictionary
- Yule, Henry and A. C. Burnell. Hobson-Jobson: A Glossary of Colloquial Anglo-Indian Words and Phrases and of Kindred Terms, Etymological, Historical, Geographical and Discursive. (various editions, 1903 and after) PE 3501 Y78 1968
- Nihalani, Paroo et al. Indian and British English (2004) PE 3501. N54
Philippines
- Philippine English Group Report [esp. Grammar, discourse particles, and accent.
- Bautista, Maria Lourdes. Defining Standard Philippine English. (2000) PE3502. P5 B38 [Based on ICE Philippines. Good shorter article "Investigating the grammatical features of Philippine English" in Lourdes and Bolton, pp, 201-218.]
- _______________________ and Kingsley Bolton, eds. Philippine English: Linguistic and Literary Perspectives. (2008) PE3502.P5 P45 2008 [source of articles on Lexicography and Syntax in our packet, also the range of phonological features of PE]
- Thompson, Roger M. Filipino English and Taglish: language switches from multiple perspectives (2003) PE3502.P5 T47 2003
Hong Kong
- Hong Kong Corpus of Spoken English
- Bolton, Kingsley. Chinese Englishes: a sociolinguistic history Cambridge UP (2003) PE3502.C54 B65 2003
- Nury Vittachi,"From Yinglish to sado-mastication"
WE 19:3 (2000):405-414
Ireland
- Irish Features of Pronunciation (by Eric Armstrong)
- Liam T. reading Yeats' "Wild Swans at Coole"