Skip to main content Accessibility help
×
Hostname: page-component-586b7cd67f-vdxz6 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-28T02:13:54.608Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

21 - Unearthing the Diachrony of World Englishes

from Part III - Linguistics and World Englishes

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  16 December 2019

Daniel Schreier
Affiliation:
Universität Zürich
Marianne Hundt
Affiliation:
Universität Zürich
Edgar W. Schneider
Affiliation:
Universität Regensburg, Germany
Get access

Summary

This chapter mainly focuses on research into the history of standard varieties of English in Kachru’s Inner and Outer Circles. There is a long research tradition relating to the diachrony of the two major Inner Circle varieties of British and American English but it is only since about 2000 that there has been a growing number of diachronic studies on the other mother-tongue Englishes, spoken in Ireland, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand. Interest in the historical development of Outer Circle varieties (the so-called New Englishes) is even more recent, with most studies emphasizing the external history of these Englishes. Investigations of the development of linguistic structure are very rare indeed, especially regarding spoken English. One section of this chapter outlines models of the evolution of World Englishes (WEs) and their implications for research. There are also sections on existing corpora that can be used in researching the history of WEs as well as on ongoing corpus compilation and the difficulties such projects meet. Finally, the usefulness of scattered, individual early data for the reconstruction of earlier stages of WEs is illustrated.

Type
Chapter
Information
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2020

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Anon. 1833. The Western Coast of Africa. Journal of an Officer under Captain Owen. + Leonard, Peter Records of a Voyage in the Ship Dryad, in 1830, 1831, and 1832. Philadelphia: Edward C. Mielke.Google Scholar
Apponsah, K. 1968. African writers must be up and doing. The Evening News, February 20, p. 4.Google Scholar
Banbury, G. A. Lethbridge. 1888. Sierra Leone: or, the White Man’s Grave. London: Swan Sonnenschein, Lowrey & Co.Google Scholar
Baugh, Albert C. and Cable, Thomas. 2012. A History of the English language (6th ed.). London: Routledge.Google Scholar
Baker, Philip. 1993. Australian influence on Melanesian Pidgin English. Te Reo 36(3): 67.Google Scholar
Baker, Philip. 1987. Historical developments in Chinese Pidgin English and the nature of the relationships between the various Pidgin Englishes of the Pacific region. Journal of Pidgin and Creole Languages 2: 163207.Google Scholar
Baker, Philip and Huber, Magnus. 2001. Atlantic, Pacific, and world-wide features in English-lexicon contact languages. English World-Wide 22: 157208.Google Scholar
Bauer, Laurie. 1993. Manual of information to accompany the Wellington Corpus of Written New Zealand English. http://clu.uni.no/icame/manuals/WELLMAN/INDEX.HTMGoogle Scholar
Baxter, Laura. 2010. Lexical diffusion in the early stages of the merry-marry merger. University of Pennsylvania Working Papers in Linguistics 16(2). http://repository.upenn.edu/pwpl/vol16/iss2/3Google Scholar
Behrendt, Stephen D., Latham, A. J. H. and Northrup, David. 2010. The Diary of Antera Duke, an Eighteenth-Century African Slave Trader. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Bekker, Ian. 2017. Earlier South African English. In Hickey, Raymond, ed. Listening to the Past: Audio Records of Accents of English. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 464483.Google Scholar
Biewer, Carolin, Tobias Bernaisch, , Mike Berger, , and Heller, Benedikt. 2014. Compiling the Diachronic Corpus of Hong Kong English (DC-HKE): Motivation, progress and challenges. Poster presented at the 35th ICAME Conference, Nottingham, England, April 30–May 5 2014.Google Scholar
Bloomfield, Leonard. 1933. Language. New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston.Google Scholar
Boberg, Charles. 2017. Archival data on earlier Canadian English. In Hickey, Raymond, ed. Listening to the Past: Audio Records of Accents of English. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 375394.Google Scholar
Borlongan, Ariane Macalinga and Dita, Shirley N.. 2015. Taking a look at expanded predicates in Philippine English across time, Asian Englishes. Asian Englishes 17: 240247.Google Scholar
Brato, Thorsten. 2019. The Historical Corpus of English in Ghana (HiCE Ghana): Motivation, compilation, opportunities. In Esimaje, Alexandra, Gut, Ulrike and Antia, Bassey E., eds. Corpus Linguistics and African Englishes. Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 119141.Google Scholar
Brato, Thorsten. 2018. “Outdooring” the Historical Corpus of English in Ghana: Insights from the compilation of a historical corpus of New English. English Today 34(2): 2534.Google Scholar
Brown, Philip Penton and Scragg, John. 1938. Common Errors in Gold Coast English (2nd ed.). Accra: Scottish Mission Book Depot.Google Scholar
Calabrese, Rita, Chambers, J. K. and Leitner, Gerhard, eds. 2015. Variation and Change in Postcolonial Contexts. Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Publishing.Google Scholar
Clarke, Sandra, Paul De Decker, and Gerard, Van Herk. 2017. Canadian Raising in Newfoundland? Insights from early vernacular recordings. In Hickey, Raymond, ed. Listening to the Past: Audio Records of Accents of English. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 395413.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Collins, Peter, ed. 2015. Grammatical Change in English World-Wide. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Collins, Peter, Borlongan, Ariane Macalinga and Yao, Xinyue. 2014. Modality in Philippine English. Journal of English Linguistics 42: 6888.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Cox, Felicity and Palethorpe, Sallyanne. 2017. Open vowels in historical Australian English. In Hickey, Raymond, ed. Listening to the Past: Audio Records of Accents of English. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 502528.Google Scholar
Dollinger, Stefan. 2010. Written sources for Canadian English: Phonetic reconstruction and the low-back vowel merger. In Hickey, Raymond, ed. Varieties of English in Writing: The Written Word as Linguistic Evidence. Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 197221.Google Scholar
Fritz, Clemens W. A. 2007. From English in Australia to Australian English 1788–1900. Frankfurt: Peter Lang.Google Scholar
Fuchs, Robert. 2017. The progressive in 19th- and 20th-century Indian English: A pilot study. Paper presented at the 7th Biennial International Conference on the Linguistics of Contemporary English, Universidade de Vigo (Spain), September 28–30, 2017.Google Scholar
Fuchs, Robert and Borlongan, Ariane. 2016. Recent diachronic change in the use of the present perfect and past tense in Philippine and Indian English. Paper presented at the 4th conference of the International Society for the Linguistics of English (ISLE 4), Poznań (Poland), September 18–21, 2016.Google Scholar
Gooden, Shelome and Drayton, Kathy-Ann. 2017. The Caribbean: Trinidad and Jamaica. In Hickey, Raymond, ed. Listening to the Past: Audio Records of Accents of English. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 414443.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Gordon, Elizabeth, Campbell, Lyle, Hay, Jennifer, Maclagan, Margaret, Sudbury, Andrea and Trudgill, Peter. 2004. New Zealand English: Its Origins and Evolution. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Gries, Stefan Th., Bernaisch, Tobias and Heller, Benedikt. 2018. A corpus-linguistic account of the history of the genitive alternation in Singapore English. In Deshors, Sandra C., ed. Modeling World Englishes: Assessing the Interplay of Emancipation and Globalization of ESL Varieties. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.Google Scholar
Hackert, Stephanie. 2015. Pseudotitles in Bahamian English: A case of Americanization? Journal of English Linguistics 43: 143167.Google Scholar
Hackert, Stephanie. 2014. Recent grammatical change in Caribbean English: A corpus-based study of Bahamian newswriting. Paper presented at the 3rd conference of the International Society for the Linguistics of English (ISLE3), Zurich (Switzerland), August 24–27, 2014.Google Scholar
Hackert, Stephanie and Deuber, Dagmar. 2015. American influence on written Caribbean English: A diachronic analysis of newspaper reportage in the Bahamas and in Trinidad and Tobago. In Collins, Peter, ed. Grammatical Change in English World-Wide. Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 389410.Google Scholar
Hackert, Stephanie and Wengler, Diana. 2017. Genitive variation and change in postcolonial Englishes: Focus on semantic relations. Paper presented at the 7th Biennial International Conference on the Linguistics of Contemporary English, Universidade de Vigo (Spain), September 28–30, 2017.Google Scholar
Hackert, Stephanie and Wengler, Diana. 2016. Recent grammatical change in postcolonial Englishes: A real-time study of genitive variation in Caribbean and Indian newswriting. Paper presented at the 19th International Conference on English Historical Linguistics, Essen (Germany), August 22–26, 2016.Google Scholar
Hay, Jennifer, MacLagan, Margaret and Gordon, Elizabeth. 2008. Dialects of English: New Zealand English. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.Google Scholar
Hall, Robert A. 1962. The life cycle of pidgin languages. Lingua 11: 151156.Google Scholar
Hansen, Beke and Heller, Benedikt. 2017. Expansion of the s-genitive in World Englishes. Paper presented at the 7th Biennial International Conference on the Linguistics of Contemporary English, Universidade de Vigo (Spain), September 28–30, 2017.Google Scholar
Herlein, J. D. 1718. Beschrijvinge van de volksplantinge Zuriname. Leeuwarden: Injema.Google Scholar
Hickey, Raymond, ed. 2004. Legacies of Colonial English: Studies in Transported Dialects. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Hickey, Raymond. 2017. Early recordings of Irish English. In Hickey, Raymond, ed. Listening to the Past: Audio Records of Accents of English. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 199231.Google Scholar
Hoffmann, Sebastian. 2013. The Corpus of Historical Singapore English – Practical and methodological issues. Paper presented at UCREL Corpus Research Seminar, Lancaster University, March 26, 2013. http://ucrel.lancs.ac.uk/crs/attachments/UCRELCRS-2013–03-26-Hoffmann-Slides.pdfGoogle Scholar
Hoffmann, Sebastian, Sand, Andrea and Tan, Peter. 2012. The Corpus of Historical Singapore English: A first pilot study on data from the 1950s and 1960s. Paper presented at the 33 ICAME Conference. Belgium: University of Leuven.Google Scholar
Holm, John. 1989. Pidgins and Creoles, Vol. 2: Reference survey. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Huber, Magnus. 2017. Early recordings from Ghana. A variationist approach to the phonological history of an Outer Circle variety. In Hickey, Raymond, ed. Listening to the Past: Audio Records of Accents of English. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 444463.Google Scholar
Huber, Magnus. 2014. Stylistic and sociolinguistic variation in Schneider’s Nativization Phase. T-affrication and relativization in Ghanaian English. In Buschfeld, Sarah, Hoffmann, Thomas, Huber, Magnus and Kautzsch, Alexander, eds. The Evolution of Englishes: The Dynamic Model and Beyond. Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 86106.Google Scholar
Huber, Magnus and Schmidt, Sebastian. 2011. New ways of analysing the history of varieties of English. Early Highlife recordings from Ghana. Paper presented at the second conference of the International Society for the Linguistics of English (ISLE2), Boston (USA), June 17–21, 2011.Google Scholar
Hudson-Ettle, Diana M. and Schmied, Josef. 1999. Manual to accompany the East African component of the International Corpus of English (ICE-EA): Background information, coding conventions and lists of source texts. http://clu.uni.no/icame/manuals/ICE_EA.PDFGoogle Scholar
Hundt, Marianne. 2012. Towards a corpus of early written New Zealand English: News from Erewhon? Te Reo 55: 5174.Google Scholar
Hundt, Marianne. 2009. Colonial lag, colonial innovation, or simply language change? In Rohdenburg, Günter and Schlüter, Julia, eds. One Language, Two Grammars: Morphosyntactic Differences between British and American English. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1337.Google Scholar
Hundt, Marianne and Leech, Geoffrey. 2012. Small is beautiful: On the value of standard reference corpora for observing recent grammatical change. In Nevalainen, Terttu and Closs, Elizabeth Traugott, eds. The Oxford Handbook of the History of English. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 175188.Google Scholar
Hundt, Marianne and Szmrecsanyi, Benedikt. 2012. Animacy in early New Zealand English. English World-Wide 33: 241263.Google Scholar
Kachru, Braj B. 1988. The sacred cows of English. English Today 4: 38.Google Scholar
Kachru, Braj B. 1985. Standards, codification and sociolinguistic realism: The English language in the outer circle. In Quirk, Randolph and Widdowson, H. G., eds. English in the World: Teaching and Learning the Language and Literatures. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1130.Google Scholar
Kemp, Dennis 1898. Nine Years at the Gold Coast. London: MacMillan and Co.Google Scholar
Kortmann, Bernd and Lunkenheimer, Kerstin, eds. 2012. The Mouton World Atlas of Variation in English. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.Google Scholar
Kortmann, Bernd and Schneider, Edgar W., eds. 2004. A Handbook of Varieties of English: A Multimedia Reference Tool, Vol. 1: Phonology. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.Google Scholar
Leech, Geoffrey and Smith, Nick. 2005. Extending the possibilities of corpus-based research on English in the twentieth century: A prequel to LOB and FLOB. ICAME Journal 29: 8398.Google Scholar
Mair, Christian and Winkle, Claudia. 2012. Change from to-infinitive to bare infinitive in specificational cleft sentences: Data from World Englishes. In Hundt, Marianne and Gut, Ulrike, eds. Mapping Unity in Diversity Worldwide: Corpus-Based Studies of New Englishes. Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 243262.Google Scholar
Michaelis, Susanne Maria, Maurer, Philippe, Haspelmath, Martin and Huber, Magnus, eds. 2013. The Survey of Pidgin and Creole Languages, Vol 1: English-Based and Dutch-Based Languages. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Moag, Rodney F. 1982. The life cycle of non-native Englishes: A case study. In Kachru, Braj B., ed. The Other Tongue: English across Cultures. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 270290.Google Scholar
Mukherjee, Joybrato and Bernaisch, Tobias. 2015. Cultural keywords in context. A pilot study of linguistic acculturation in South Asian Englishes. In Collins, Peter, ed. Grammatical Change in English World-Wide. Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 411435.Google Scholar
Mukherjee, Joybrato and Schilk, Marco. 2012. Exploring variation and change in New Englishes. Looking into the International Corpus of English (ICE) and beyond. In Nevalainen, Terttu and Closs, Elizabeth Traugott, eds. The Oxford Handbook of the History of English. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 189199.Google Scholar
Noël, Dirk, Bertus van Rooy, and van der Auwera, Johan, eds. 2014. Diachronic approaches to modality in World Englishes (Special edition). Journal of English Linguistics 42(1).Google Scholar
Obeng, Richard Emmanuel. 1998. Eighteenpence. Ed. Dako, Kari. Accra: Sub-Saharan Publishers.Google Scholar
Peters, Pam. 2014. Differentiation in Australian English. In Buschfeld, Sarah, Hoffmann, Thomas, Huber, Magnus and Kautzsch, Alexander, eds. The Evolution of Englishes: The Dynamic Model and Beyond. Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 107125.Google Scholar
Reinecke, John. 1937. Marginal languages: A sociological survey of the creole languages and trade jargons. Unpublished doctoral dissertation, Yale University.Google Scholar
Rodríguez Louro, Celeste. 2015. The evolution of epistemic marking in West Australian English. In Collins, Peter, ed. Grammatical Change in English World-Wide. Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 205220.Google Scholar
Schachter, Paul 1962. Teaching English Pronunciation to the Twi-Speaking Student. Legon: Ghana University Press.Google Scholar
Schneider, Edgar W. 2003. The dynamics of New Englishes: From identity construction to dialect birth. Language 79: 233281.Google Scholar
Schneider, Edgar W. 2007. Postcolonial English: Varieties Around the World. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Schreier, Daniel. 2017. Early twentieth-century Tristan da Cunha h’English. In Hickey, Raymond, ed. Listening to the Past: Audio Records of Accents of English. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 484501.Google Scholar
Schreier, Daniel, Trudgill, Peter, Schneider, Edgar W. and Williams, Jeffrey P., eds. 2010. The Lesser-Known Varieties of English: An Introduction. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Schuchardt, Hugo. 1909. Die Lingua Franca. Zeitschrift für Romanische Philologie 33: 441461.Google Scholar
Sedlatschek, Andreas. 2009. Contemporary Indian English. Variation and Change. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.Google Scholar
Sey, Kofi A. 1973. Ghanaian English. An Exploratory Survey. London: Macmillan.Google Scholar
Shastri, S.V. 1986. Manual of information to accompany the Kolhapur Corpus of Indian English, for use with digital computers. http://clu.uni.no/icame/kolhapur/kolman.htm.Google Scholar
Sóskuthy, Márton, Hay, Jennifer, Maclagan, Margaret, Drager, Katie and Foulkes, Paul. 2017. Early New Zealand English: The closing diphthongs. In Hickey, Raymond, ed. Listening to the Past: Audio Records of Accents of English. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 529561.Google Scholar
Strevens, Peter. 1980. Teaching English as an International Language: From Practice to Principle. Oxford: Pergamon Press.Google Scholar
Strevens, Peter 1965. Pronunciations of English in West Africa. In Strevens, Peter, ed. Papers in Language and Language Teaching. London: Oxford University Press, 110122.Google Scholar
Strevens, Peter. 19531954. Spoken English in the Gold Coast. English Language Teaching 8: 8189.Google Scholar
Temple, Charles Lindsay. 1918. Native Races and Their Rulers: Sketches and Studies of Official Life and Administrative Problems in Nigeria. Cape Town: Argus Printing & Publishing Company.Google Scholar
Thomason, Sarah G. 2008. Pidgins/creoles and historical linguistics. In Kouwenberg, Silvia and Singler, John Victor, eds. The Handbook of Pidgin and Creole Studies. Oxford: Blackwell, 242262.Google Scholar
Trudgill, Peter. 2004. New-Dialect Formation: The Inevitability of Colonial Englishes. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Velupillai, Viveka. 2015. Pidgins, Creoles and Mixed Languages. An Introduction. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.Google Scholar

Save book to Kindle

To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure [email protected] is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.

Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.

Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.

Available formats
×

Save book to Dropbox

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.

Available formats
×

Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

Available formats
×