Published online by Cambridge University Press: 04 October 2017
This study investigates how the descriptor ‘broken English’ is used to construct speakers as nonnative within standard language ideology. In-depth analysis of examples found through WebCorp, used to search US websites, and the Corpus of Contemporary American English found that the term was largely used to refer to comprehensible English identified as nonnative. Users of such English were constructed as Other, usually highly negatively. The rarer cases of more positive descriptions referred to encounters outside English-speaking countries, consistent with monolingualist ideology, and when used for a more distantly superior person, made them more attractive through greater apparent accessibility. Four mechanisms are discussed by which use of the term naturalizes ideologies. Crucially, its ambiguity promotes slippage between ‘neutral’ and negative uses, allowing any English identified as nonnative to be characterized as ‘broken’, slipping into ‘not English’, with such descriptions treated as an acceptable way to identify nonnative speakers as public menace. (Standard language ideology, ideology of nativeness, monolingualist ideology, Othering, corpus-informed research)*
The authors wish to thank Diane Belcher, Eliana Hirano, and Paula Golombek and others at the University of Florida for their helpful comments and discussion on earlier presentations of this material, and Matthew Nelson, Stephen Skalicky, two anonymous reviewers, and editor Jenny Cheshire for their helpful feedback on earlier versions of the manuscript. Remaining flaws are of course our own.