ENGL 473: World/New/Post Colonial Englishes

Fall 2009—George L. Dillon

Sir Stamford Raffles,
Founder of Singapore

Texts:
Jennifer Jenkins, World Englishes, 2^nd ed. Routledge, 2009. ISBN-10: 0415466121

Rajend Mesthrie and Rakesh M. Bhatt, World Englishes: The Study of New Linguistic Varieties. Cambridge UP, 2008. ISBN-10: 0521797330

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:

1.(from newspaper)
Health and environment him all big-fellow something all woman along country today he got big-fellow worry along him.

2. ...which-one principal came here, she's just cheeky like the other one

3. (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.

4. 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!

5. (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 would 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 they have attracted a great deal of scholarly attention recently.

In this course, we will study a handful of these New Englishes, exploring 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. We will also be grappling with issues of history and politics—with issues of the Standard, cultural identity and exclusion, and the heritage of colonialism, and with Edgar Schneider's model of stages of emergence of a New English, which makes American English the oldest and most mature New English. By the end of the course, we should have a fair grasp of the stakes and probable outcomes, along with a roaring desire to do some on-site observations.

Procedures: We will set up 6 work groups to collect, organize, and analyze samples of the six NE variants (Singpore, Hong Kong, Philippines, East Africa, Jamaica, India) that have an ICE corpus (http://www.ucl.ac.uk/english-usage/ice/), internet radio stations, and links to local newspapers. (For the design of the corpora, look here. These groups should get organized fairly quickly and decide on that topics and areas they want to cover which should include material on the four kinds of structure and use we will be tracking, use in the local entertainment media, use in the broadcast news and talk shows, literary writing, and usage in the schools and universities. The group report should include some reference to published articles in the three major journals (World Englishes, English Today, and English World-Wide) . The resulting report should be a presentation of and guide to the New English with illustrations, pointers to some resources for learning more about it, and some discussion of the issues raised in the scholarly analysis of the NE. A website would be ideal. Commentaries on the presentations, except those on the day your group presents, will be required the day after each presentation for forwarding to the presenting groups (to assist in preparation of their final version of the report). This will be in lieu of a final exam.

For a more explicit assignment, go to Group Assignment.

In addition, each student should track their group's variant as we move through the course by spending a few minutes a day listening, reading, and taking notes in a journal log. You will thus glean data to contribute to the class and material for papers. In addition, you should read at least two articles about your variant and engage it. The final individual paper should go into one aspect of their variant in more detail than was possible in the group presentation.

More instructions

Assignment for Individual Project

Your project should spring from something in your reading or observation that you want to explore in more detail than in the group report. You should find an article or two that discusses the item and you should gather more information about its use. The likeliest place to look for data is a domain search in Google. If you take this track, you will be describing the use of the item on the Web, and you should actually compile a little archive of uses that support and illustrate what you conclude about the item.

For example, you could investigate the kena passive in Singaporean by running a search in Google "kena site: .sg" After you have closely examined the first 25,000 hits (ok, a joke, cut to a reasonable number), you can describe the range of sites where it appears and the range of verbs that occur or the nouns that are "kena'd." This would result in a "user's guide" for kena passives on the Web.

For another option, you could examine the literary writings of someone working in one of the New Englishes, describing both the traits of the NE that she includes and the function and effect of using them in the work. If you think that a wider, international audience is addressed, how does the work make itself accessible to that audience? Send me an email in the next two weeks with a brief description of your project.

Length: 10-12 pages

Due: Friday, Dec. 18th (earlier is welcome).

[close]

You should each download a copy of the free concordancer program AntConc for multiple uses, starting as a browser for your Ice Corpus (engl473/ice_corpora)

Schedule of Topics and Assignments

Resources

General

1. • IPA Chart Pronounced or,
     IPA Charts (Paul Meier)
   • IPA character picker
   • Accents of English from Around the World (fixed!)
   • 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
2. Library (can be online)
   • World Englishes
   • English Today
   • English World-Wide
3. ICE corpora tagged and loaded into Corpus Work Bench Concordancer

Jamaica

• Audio for ICE-JA: S1A-002
• Jamaican Patois Patwa Dictionary (pronouncing)
• RadioStationWorld: Jamaica

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• 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

• Edinburgh pronunciation table
• The Coxford Singlish Dictionary
• Razor TV (Straits Times)
• Speak Good English

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• Detering, David. Singapore English. (2001)
• Low, Ee Ling and Adam Brown. English in Singapore: An Introduction (2005) PE 3502.S5 L69 2005 [contrast of Singlish and StdE]
• Lim, Lisa ed. Singapore English: a grammatical description (2004) PE33502.S5 S56 2004 (out on loan)

Nigeria

• Words of Life
• Fortis Radio

India

• Edinburgh Accent Table
• All India Radio:News (audio)

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• 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

• Bautista, Maria Lourdes. Defining Standard Philippine English. (2000) PE3502. P5 B38 [Based on ICE Philippines]
• _______________________ and Kingsley Bolton, eds. Philippine English: Linguistic and Literary Perspectives. (2008)
• Thompson, Roger M. Filipino English and Taglish: language switches from multiple perspectives (2003)

Hong Kong

• Nury Vittachi,"From Yinglish to sado-mastication" WE 19:3 (2000):405-414

George Dillon (dillon@u.washington.edu)
Office hrs: TuTH 12-1 in A404 Padelford
the URL of this document is: courses.washington.edu/englhtml/engl473/engl473.html
Last Revised: 9/30/09