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Chapter 8 - Linguistic Colloquialisation, Democratisation and Gender in Asian Englishes

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  11 December 2020

By
Lucía Loureiro-Porto
Edited by
Tobias Bernaisch
Tobias Bernaisch
Affiliation:
Justus-Liebig-Universität Giessen, Germany
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Summary

Linguistic colloquialisation and democratisation are said to be responsible for some of the recent changes in inner-circle varieties of English. Thus, colloquialisation is said to be the process that explains changes such as an increase in the use of the future marker be going to, an increase in the frequency of not negation to the detriment of no negation, and an increase in the use of contractions, among others. Democratisation is claimed to be at the root of an increasing use of non-sexist language, including the use of neutral professional terms (e.g. fire-fighter instead of fireman), the use of gender-neutral or inclusive third-person singular pronouns (singular they, or coordinate he or she, rather than generic he), a decline in the use of deontic modal must and a parallel increase of the semi-modals have to and need to. This paper explores these six markers in two Asian Englishes spoken in India and Hong Kong from a genderlectal perspective using ICE-India and ICE-Hong Kong. The results show that (i) colloquialisation and democratisation are global tendencies; (ii) that Hong Kong English is closer to Inner-Circle varieties of English than Indian English regarding these two phenomena; and (iii) that Indian women are clear leaders of the six changes related to colloquialisation and democratisation.

Keywords

Indian EnglishHong Kong Englishcolloquialisationdemocratisationlogistic regressionfemale leadWorld Englishesgendercorpus linguisticsmultifactorial statistics
Type
Chapter
Information
Gender in World Englishes , pp. 176 - 204
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2021

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