A4 - Variation across postcolonial Englishes

• According to Platt, Weber and Ho, a postcolonial English fulfills the four criteria:

  • developed through the education system
  • developed in an area where native variety of English was not the language spoken by most of the population
  • used for a range of functions among those who speak or write it in the region where it is used
  • become localized or nativized by adopting some language features of its own, such as sounds, intonation patterns, sentence structures, words, and expressions
• Bamgbose outlines five internal factors that can be used to decide on the status of an innovation in English:

  • the demographic factor
  • the geographical factor
  • the authoritative factor
  • codification
  • the acceptability factor
• Which two factors are the most crucial according to Bamgbose?

  codification and acceptability
• Levels of variation: grammar, vocabulary/idiom, pronunciation, discourse style
• In most varieties, the pronunciation of clear and dark l is not distinguished
• • Vowel quality: how high/low and forward/back the tongue is in the mouth, and the degree to which lips are rounded or spread
  • Vowel quantity: how long the sound is actually maintained
• The majority of New English varieties are syllable-timed rather than stress-timed
• Tendencies in noun uses

  • not to mark nouns for plural
  • nouns are marked for specific/non-specific distinction rather than definite/indefinite distinction
  • not to change the form of quantifiers
  • not to make distinction between he and she
  • not to change word order within the noun phrase
• Tendencies in verb uses:

  • limited marking of the third person singular present tense form
  • limited marking of verbs for the past tense
  • use an aspect system rather than a tense system
  • extend the use of be + verb-ing constructions to stative verbs
  • use different phrasal and prepositional verb constructions
  • use of a general or undifferentiated question tag form
• Idioms:

  • direct translations from indigenous idioms
  • based on native speaker English
  • combine elements from English with indigenous forms
  • other idioms are variations on native speaker ones

  => difficulty in distinguishing between creativity and incorrectness
• Discourse style:

  • More formal character than Inner Circle Englishes (e.g. more complex vocabulary and grammatical structure)
  • Indian English: lengthy constructions, bookish vocabulary and exaggerated forms which make even a formal style appear ‘more formal’ to a speaker of another variety of English”
• the phenomenon of code-mixing/code-switching (recently: translanguaging) (using words, phrases, and longer stretches of speech in two or more languages) is characteristic of the speech of bi- and multilingual people
• Locally coined words/expressions:

  • add a prefix or suffix to an existing (British or indigenous) word
  • combine local concept with English items