World Englishes.docx

World Englishes: New Theoretical and Methodological Perspectives. Seoane, E. and Suarez-Gomez, C. (eds.). 1985. Amsterdam: John Benjamins
As a non-native speaker of English, I have often wondered what it must feel like to be born speaking a language that you can use more or less all over the world. To be an English speaker is indeed to be in possession of a quasi-universal tool of communication. Few would have imagined that the Germanic dialect brought to the shores of England in the 5th c. would one day conquer the world. But conquer it did, and, like a living organism, in order to survive it had to change and adapt. From mono-centric, it morphed into a poli-centric language, gaining in variation at all levels. To acknowledge this immense variety a new term, and a new field of study, was coined: World Englishes.
The volume under review, intelligently edited by Seoane and Suarez-Gomez, brings together a collection of ten articles on the current state of affairs in the burgeoning field of World Englishes. As the editors note (p. 5), '[d]espite the proliferation of high quality publications, it remains the case [...] that "we lack thorough and more comprehensive empirical documentation and especially quantitative investigations and correlative studies of most of these varieties"'.
The contributors to this volume address a number of issues and take different approaches. Interestingly, they do it both from a synchronic and a diachronic perspective. They explore central aspects of language change and dialect evolution. These aspects are actually can actually be of interest not only to the scholar of World Englishes but also, crucially, to anyone interested in sociolinguistics and language change and variation.
The collection opens with a chapter (p. 17) by Mair on the current state of World Englishes research across the globe. This is a very useful and interesting contribution which will be appreciated by the expert but that can also be used as an introduction to the topic. Using a specific example, the use of African American rhetorical devices of augmentation in a Nigerian diasporic community, he problematizes the traditional model of the spread of varieties.
Hunt (p. 36), uses a corpus linguistics approach to investigate the potential of 'errors' influenced by the interference of substrate varieties to become features of a new variety. Hundt looks at the unusual auxillary-participle combination (BE been) which, she argues, has the potential of being an emergent contact feature or, more interestingly, an instance of incipient language change. Her discussion is useful because it allows to reflect on the methodologies used in the description of World Englishes, as well as grammaticality and norms, more generally.
Palacios Martínez (p. 62) compares the use of third person don't versus doesn't in the language of British teenagers and adults, using a corpus-based methodology. In so doing, the author clearly demonstrates the values of corpora and computer-assisted research in analysing variation in general and the emergence and spread of varieties in World English. Interestingly, Palacios Martínez takes into account variables such as gender, as well as age and ethnic group.
The standards of English in the Caribbean, their history, attitudes to them, features and functions are the topic of Hackert's chapter (p. 85). In her paper, the author presents and discusses a report of the state of research into standards of English in the Anglophone Caribbean. This very clear contribution is likely to be, like so much in this volume, of interest not only to World Englishes students and scholars but also to those with an interest in the literature of the Caribbean, whose study it can facilitate by focussing on the linguistic aspect of it.
Werner (p. 113) examines aspects of the Present Perfect (PrPf + V-en) in World Englishes. This is not a new topic and it often causes bafflement in people o studied British English who are the exposed to British English, and vice-versa. Using a corpus, Werner looks at various aspects of Present Perfect use across the world, such as semantics and temporal adverbials. This makes the chapter particularly interesting for and useful to both teachers and students of English as L2.
Loureiro-Porto (p. 143) explores the status of the semi-modals need (to), want to and have to in the Englishes of Hong Kong and India. She analyses them from both a syntactic and a semantic point of view with examples taken from the International Corpus of English. Among her conclusions is the one that colloqualisation and grammaticalisation 'operate synergetically in the replacement of modals with semi-modals' (p. 143).
Indian English has fascinated scholars and lay people alike for a long time. Davydova (p. 173) offers a corpus-based variationist analysis that aims to trace the development of quotative marking (say, be like and more). She illustrates old and newer variants and offers an interesting analysis of their use in different speech domains and the ways in which these interact with status, education, and gender as well as making some predictions on future developments and offering suggestions for future research.
The indexing of identity through language has always been a central interest of sociolinguists. In a truly fascinating and well-researched paper, Zipp and Staicov (p. 205) look at the indexing of identity with speech rhythm in San Francisco Chinatown. As well as being a study on this particular topic, the chapter is also a useful reflection on the 'methodological challenges of determining and quantifying ethnic identity' (p. 205) using questionnaires and interviews, thus offering help to researchers with an interest in sociophonetics, as well as a clearly presented case-study.
Latinen and Levin (p. 229) present their observations of subjective progressives (e.g. I'm always working). Their study investigates how an ongoing grammatical change in American English is being adapted globally. They conclude that as the spread of English continues, so the divisions of the different English varieties is becoming more blurred, something which has clear and obvious implications for L2 learning and teaching.
The concluding chapter, by Schneider (p. 253) looks at the usefulness of YouTube for investigating linguistic features, in particular of World Englishes. The author divides YouTube clips into "metalinguistic" and "natural", giving a typology of each, and concludes by offering an assessment of each type for their value as tools of linguistic analysis.
'World Englishes: New Theoretical and Methodological Considerations' is an extraordinary resource for the study of worldwide variation in the English language. Because of its size, content-type and quality and the mix of theoretical and applied nature of the research it presents, it is a high-quality tool that can and will be appreciated both by established scholars and novices in the field. Its main strength lies, in this reviewer's opinion, in the right balance between theory and practice, and in the variety of methodologies that the volume's contributors use. Teachers of English as L2 (but also of L1!) will certainly find it a useful complement to their activities. One that, crucially has also the potential to empower, as well as to inform. The editors have put together an excellent collection of papers that is both informative and challenging. For students of World Englishes this text is likely to become fundamental and could easily be used as a complement to a textbook on the subject.




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