Hostname: page-component-586b7cd67f-gb8f7 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-28T08:17:22.063Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

The trouble with World Englishes

Rethinking the concept of ‘geographical varieties’ of English

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  15 August 2013

Jakob R. E. Leimgruber
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Extract

Ever since the 1980s, when research interest in the field of ‘World Englishes’ began to gather speed, the view of the English language around the world has been largely dominated by the construct of so-called ‘varieties’ of English. These varieties are usually given a geographical label (‘Singapore English’, ‘Welsh English’, ‘South African English’, ‘Fiji English’, etc), and are described in terms of their pronunciation, their grammar, and their vocabulary. The resulting anthologies (see e.g. Wells, 1982; Trudgill & Hannah, 1982; Kortmann et al., 2004) have contributed a lot to our understanding of how English varies globally, as well as to raising the profile of non-inner circle (Kachru, 1985) varieties, which had previously not benefited from as much attention.

Type
Research Article
Information
English Today , Volume 29 , Issue 3 , September 2013 , pp. 3 - 7
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2013 

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

Alsagoff, L. 2010. ‘English in Singapore: culture, capital and identity in linguistic variation.’ World Englishes, 29, 336–48.Google Scholar
Blommaert, J. 2010. The Sociolinguistics of Globalisation. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Bruthiaux, P. 2003. ‘Squaring the circles: issues in modelling English worldwide.’ International Journal of Applied Linguistics, 13, 159–78.Google Scholar
Carter, D. & Deuchar, M. 2011. ‘A systematic comparison of factors affecting the choice of matrix language in three bilingual communities.’ Journal of Language Contact, 4(2), 153–83.Google Scholar
Deuchar, M., Davies, P., Parafita Couto, M. C. & Carter, D. forthcoming. ‘Code-switching corpora: A state of the art.’ In Mennen, I. & Thomas, E. M. (eds), Unraveling Bilingualism: A Cross-Disciplinary Perspective. Bristol: Multilingual Matters.Google Scholar
Gupta, A. F. 1994. The Step-Tongue: Children's English in Singapore. Clevedon: Multilingual Matters.Google Scholar
Kachru, B. B. 1985. ‘Standards, codification and sociolinguistic realism: the English language in the outer circle.’ In Quirk, R. & Widdowson, H. (eds), English in the World: Teaching and Learning the Language and Literatures. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 11–36.Google Scholar
Kortmann, B. & Szmrecsanyi, B. 2011. ‘Parameters of morphosyntactic variation in World Englishes: prospects and limitations of searching for universals.’ In Siemund, P. (ed.), Linguistic Universals and Language Variation. Berlin: De Gruyter Mouton, pp. 264–90.Google Scholar
Kortmann, B., Schneider, E. W., Burridge, K., Mesthrie, R., & Upton, C. 2004. A Handbook of Varieties of English: A Multimedia Reference Tool. 2 volumes plus CD-ROM. Berlin: De Gruyter.Google Scholar
Leimgruber, J. R. E. 2012. ‘Singapore English: an indexical approach.’ World Englishes, 31(1), 1–14.Google Scholar
Lewis, M. P. (ed.) 2009. Ethnologue: Languages of the World. Sixteenth edition. Dallas: SIL International.Google Scholar
Lim, L. S. & Gisborne, N. (eds) 2009. ‘The typology of Asian Englishes.’ Special issue of English World-Wide, 30(2).Google Scholar
Lyu, D.-C., Tan, T.-P., Chang, E. S., & Li, H. 2010. ‘SEAME: A Mandarin-English code-switching speech corpus in South-East Asia.’ Paper presented at INTERSPEECH 2010. Makuhari, Chiba, Japan.Google Scholar
McMahon, A., Heggarty, P., McMahon, R., & Maguire, W. 2007. ‘The sound patterns of Englishes: representing phonetic similarity.’ English Language and Linguistics, 11, 113–42.Google Scholar
Park, J. S.-Y. & Wee, L. 2009. ‘The three circles redux: a market-theoretic perspective on World Englishes.’ Applied Linguistics, 30, 389–406.Google Scholar
Pennycook, A. 1994. The Cultural Politics of English as an International Language. London: Longman.Google Scholar
Pennycook, A. 2007. Global Englishes and Transcultural Flows. Abingdon: Routledge.Google Scholar
Platt, J. T. 1975. ‘The Singapore English speech continuum and its basilect “Singlish” as a “creoloid”.’ Anthropological Linguistics, 17(7), 363–74.Google Scholar
Seargeant, P. & Tagg, C. 2011. ‘English on the internet and a “post-varieties” approach to language.’ World Englishes, 30(4), 496–514.Google Scholar
Sharma, D. 2009. ‘Typological diversity in New Englishes.’ English World-Wide, 30(2), 170–95.Google Scholar
Stammers, J. & Deuchar, M. 2012. ‘Testing the nonce borrowing hypothesis: counter-evidence from English-origin verbs in Welsh.’ Bilingualism: Language and Cognition, 15(3), 630–43.Google Scholar
Szmrecsanyi, B. 2011. ‘Corpus-based dialectometry: a methodological sketch.’ Corpora, 6(1), 45–76.Google Scholar
Trudgill, P. & Hannah, J. 1982. International English: A Guide to the Varieties of Standard English. First edition. London: Arnold.Google Scholar
Wells, J. C. 1982. Accents of English. 3 volumes. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar