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Programme: accepted abstracts

Abstract ID: 215

Part of General Paper Session (Other abstracts in this session)

World Englishes and the trouble with multilingualism

Authors: Leimgruber, Jakob
Submitted by: Leimgruber, Jakob (University of Freiburg, Germany)

In the study of World Englishes, the typical modus operandi consists in describing individual varieties of English found across the world. These varieties are subjected to sociolinguistic scrutiny, which looks at their use within the speech community and their possible co-existence with other languages, as well as to a linguistic description, which lists the grammatical, phonological, and lexical features that occur in them and not in some more ‘traditional’ form of English. Well-known introductory books, such as Trudgill & Hannah (2008), list varieties by geographical area, give a brief historical and sociolinguistic account for each, and proceed to describe the varieties based on a number of features (linguistic variables) that have been chosen for the analysis. A similar process was applied in Kortmann et al (2005), which boasts 59 varieties described by means of 255 pre-defined linguistic variables.

However, World Englishes, more often than not, exist in multilingual settings, most obviously so in ‘outer circle’ and ‘expanding circle’ (Kachru 1982) varieties, but also in ‘inner circle’ varieties such as Québec English and, notably, in urban centres, such as, for instance, London (Kerswill et al 2008) and New York (García & Fishman 2002). It is rarely the case that this multilingualism is systematically part of an analysis beyond the aforementioned brief sociolinguistic description, partly because of the reliance, in some cases, on language corpora that have been stripped of any non-English material (eg the ICE corpora), and partly because of an approach that largely disregards variation.

In this paper, I discuss ways to address these issues, from multilingual corpora to ethnographic studies, which have shown promising results in two case studies, Singapore and Wales. I conclude by proposing a system that takes several features of multilingual societies into account, thus resulting in a better-informed sociolinguistic description of World Englishes.

References:

García, Ofelia & Joshua A. Fishman. 2002. The Multilingual Apple: Languages in New York City. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter, 2nd edition.

Kachru, Braj. 1982. The Other Tongue: English across cultures. Urbana: University of Illinois Press.

Kerswill, Paul, Arfaan Khan & Eivind Torgersen. 2008. Multicultural London English and linguistic innovation. Paper presented at Sociolinguistic Symposium 17, Free University of Amsterdam, April 2008.

Kortmann, Bernd, Edgar W. Schneider, Kate Burridge, Rajend Mesthrie & Clive Upton, ed. 2004. A Handbook of Varieties of English. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. 2 volumes.

Trudgill, Peter & Jean Hannah. 2008. International English: A guide to the varieties of standard English. London: Hodder Education, 5th edition.