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The author discusses the use of English dialects in the works of English playwright William Shakespeare. She mentions the claims of words from Warwickshire, England, appearing in the plays, the lexicographical errors in those claims, and the difficulties in determining dialects without contemporary evidence.

This paper examines documents and recordings from the past 100 years to analyse the factors that affect the selection of verb form in Palmerston English. Palmerston Island is a small island in the Cook Islands group that was settled by a small group in the 1860s, which included an Englishman, a Portuguese or Portuguese-creole-speaking man, and a small group of Cook Islanders. The descendants of this population speak a dialect of English, and early documents from the island were primarily also written in vernacular English. As is the case in many varieties of English around the world, present tense verb endings do not exactly follow the Standard English pattern of -s following a third person singular subject and bare verbs elsewhere. The variation in -s marking, both historically and synchronically, has been abstracted away in previous descriptions of the dialect. This paper describes for the first time the variant verb agreement patterns found at each stage of the dialect's history, examines various grammatical and social factors that contribute to the distribution of the forms, and uses a logistic regression analysis to model the interactions of the factors and their contributions to the output. This contributes to a growing literature on the -s alternation in English dialects, and is one of only a few studies that has been able to include data from multiple individuals and also from a relatively long historical timeframe. I find that significant predictors of third person verb forms include subject type, subject number, whether the verb is be or not, and at least in the later data, the proximity of the subject to the verb. I also find that the amount of individual variation among speakers is large enough that it almost obscures diachronic variation. This is a finding that has methodological implications for future research into the phenomenon in other varieties, for example casting doubt on the usefulness of 'apparent time' studies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the variation between try to and try and in two major varieties of English, Canadian and British. Embedding our research in earlier studies of corpora, we extend our knowledge of this phenomenon to vernacular communitybased dialect data. Comparative sociolinguistic analysis and statistical methods establish the significant mechanisms underlying the alternation. Unexpected social patterns in the United Kingdom point to a change in the social evaluation of try and. Also, despite divergent external influences, there are similar internal constraints of tense and lexical verb. The authors propose that these constraints are a holdover from reanalysis in the seventeenth-century and the semantic fossilization of try and before certain verbs. They conclude that social factors may divide the major varieties of English, but longitudinal linguistic patterns endure. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study investigates the variable patterning of two English phonemes, /ɔ/ and /æ/, in the speech of 24 second- and 1.5-generation Korean Americans from Bergen County, New Jersey, which borders New York City and contains the most densely populated Korean American community in the United States. Detailed acoustic phonetic analysis reveals that in general Bergen County Korean Americans produce a raised /ɔ/ nucleus, in accordance with New York City English, and tense /æ/ in prenasal environments, in accordance with General American English. Positive correlations between speaker age and the frontness of /ɔ/ and distance in vowel space between /ɔ/ and /α/ suggest a change in apparent time toward fronting of /ɔ/ and shortening of the distance between two vowels (and hence possibly movement toward a low back merger). Speaker sex patterns are also apparent, with female speakers showing a closer distance and more overlap between /ɔ/ and /α/ than male speakers, and females showing a clearer split between tense /æ/ in prenasal environments and lax /æ/ elsewhere. In general, the patterning of variation for /æ/ among Bergen County Korean Americans shows an alignment to the general American norm, while the patterning for /ɔ/ suggests that Korean Americans are adopting the local norm. Future research will be needed to corroborate these patterns across a wider range of speaker ages. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the present paper I investigate, from a Minimalist perspective and using data from the Freiburg English Dialect corpus, the patterns of Negative Concord (NC) attested in different Traditional Dialects of British English. By arguing that lexical variation exists in the negative operator used to express sentential negation, which is truly semantic in Standard English but carries an interpretable negative feature in Traditional Dialects of British English, I explain why NC, understood as syntactic Agree between [iNeg] and [uNeg] features, is attested in the latter but not in the former. In the same vein, by arguing that in Traditional Dialects of British English two lexical entries are possible for n-words which contrast in the interpretability of the negative feature they carry ([iNeg] vs. [uNeg]), the optionality of NC in the studied Non-Standard dialects of English as well as the different patterns observed in the data can be accounted for. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Allophony in vocoid height conditioned by consonant voicing recur in geographically dispersed English dialects. Cross-dialectal consistency in the phonetic details of the patterns is due to their being recent or ongoing phonologizations of the same phonetic precursor. This paper asks whether a shared phonetic precursor can cause uniformity in the effects of more abstract factors. Diphthong Raising is described in a Mississippi dialect across three generations of speakers, systematically and orthogonally varying the morphological and prosodic context. Results are compared with published accounts of dialects in Virginia, Ontario, and the Inland North. Diphthong Raising is found to interact with stress, morphological structure, and the free vs. bound status of stems, and to do so in different ways across dialects. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper provides an acoustic phonetic description of Hawai‘i English vowels. The data comprise wordlist tokens produced by twenty-three speakers (twelve males and eleven females) and spontaneous speech tokens produced by ten of those speakers. Analysis of these vowel tokens shows that while there are similarities between Hawai‘i English and other dialects, the particular combination of vowel realizations in Hawai‘i English is unique to this dialect. Additionally, there are characteristics of the Hawai‘i English vowel system that are not found in other English dialects. These findings suggest that Hawai‘i English is a unique regional variety that warrants further description. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The paper explores the various aspects of the translation process in India, by comparing regional language and English translations of three particular regional language works, using the Malayalam and English translations of Tarashankar Bandyopadhyaya's Bangla novel Arogyaniketan, U.R. Anantha Murthy's Kannada novel Samskara, and V.S. Khandekar's Marathi novel Yayati. The obvious fluency of a bhasha translation as compared to the English translation, I argue, point to the cultural filiation shared by Indian bhasha works despite their linguistic differences. The English translator in India faces the predicament of having a target language with no cohesive target readership. In fact, without a clear idea of who she is translating for, the English translator is forced to smoothen out the vexatious cultural aspects, which resist being carried over completely across borders. On the other hand, interlingual translation between the regional languages in India is more of an intracultural than an intercultural transference, which leads to less self-conscious translations. Contrary to Lawrence Venuti's argument that ethnocentric violence is the price you pay for fluency, the bhasha translations appear to be more sensitive to cultural nuances than the English ones with all their foreignizing devices of extensive notes and glossary. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Work in perceptual dialectology has argued that listeners' successful identification of accent areas is facilitated by their geographical proximity to a particular region. Montgomery (2007, 2012) argues that this proximity effect is mediated by a 'cultural prominence' effect, where localities of high cultural salience seem less distant. We explore these claims using an online survey in which listeners were asked to identify the regional origin of speakers of five accents from England's 'linguistic north' (Liverpool, Manchester, Crewe, Stoke-on-Trent and Macclesfield) from audio clips of four different sentences. We show that the proximity and cultural prominence effects are partially supported, and that the proximity effect is driven by listeners' likely contact with/experience of the dialect in question. We also show that listeners react differently to different sentences in the same accent. While some sentences are identified correctly very often, others, even for culturally prominent locations with distinctive accents (i.e. Liverpool), are hardly ever correctly identified. We connect this to the geographical distribution of the linguistic features in the clips, and we argue that the presence, absence and range of individual linguistic features should be systematically considered in all perceptual dialectology work which uses audio stimuli. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article offers information to an instructional design course on world rhetorics, an educational program for additional global/transnational approaches to teaching of writing in secondary and tertiary education, offered at the Stony Brook University. The instructional design course outlines topics on world rhetorical traditions, factors of historical, geopolitical and thematic studies in writing and international perspectives of teaching English writing, reading and research.

This article explores translation as a useful point of departure and framework for taking a translingual approach to writing engaging globalization. Globalization and the knowledge economy are putting renewed emphasis on translation as a key site of contest between a dominant language ideology of monolingualism aligned with fast capitalist neoliberalism and an emerging language ideology variously identified as translingualism, plurilingualism, translanguaging, and transcultural literacy. We first distinguish between theories of translation aligned with neoliberalism, on the one hand, and, on the other hand, a critical approach to translation focused on the difference that a translingual approach insists translation makes to languages, language relations, and language users. We then describe ways that a translingual approach to language difference in writing can be pursued in the classroom through student experimentation with translation of ordinary texts and with paraphrase and interpretation. Treating all writing as translation, we argue, can help students and their teachers better engage with language difference as a feature of all writing rather than imagining such engagement to fall outside the norm of communicative practice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents several new words that were recognized during the American Dialect Society's 2015 Word of the Year proceedings that were held in Washington, D.C. on January 8, 2016. They include "ammosexual," "manbun," and "sitbit." Popular online slang include "fleek," "highkey," and "lowkey."

This article explores the recent changes in relative clauses in spoken British English on the basis of the Diachronic Corpus of Present-Day Spoken English (DCPSE) to find out whether the changes in speech have proceeded in parallel with those in writing over a span of thirty years in the second half of the twentieth century. The distribution patterns and rates of change of relative clauses across different spoken text categories are also investigated. It is found that relative clauses have experienced a pattern of change in spoken British English which is comparable to that in writing, with an overall higher rate of change in speech than in writing. The distribution of relative pronouns is influenced by text categories. While all text categories generally show a similar pattern of change, informal text categories seem to display a greater rate of change than formal text categories. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Schneider's Dynamic Model of Postcolonial English Development (2007) suggests that distinct local identities and their associated varieties of English emerge as a result of British colonization, and reach maturity only when ties to the colonial power are finally severed. While this developmental trajectory is well documented in many of the case studies discussed in, and since, Schneider (2007), a comparison of Hong Kong and Gibraltar shows, in certain cases, that association with Britain can be seen as the best guarantor of these local identities and varieties of English. The present article sketches this alternate developmental trajectory, and examines under what circumstances it may emerge and how widely it might be applied. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses pulmonic ingressive speech in Orkney, Scotland dialect. Topics include the use of Orkney dialect for several Scottish dialects; pulmonic ingressive speech in Scotland, cross-linguistic distribution of pulmonic ingressive speech, and typological status of pulmonic ingressive speech; and the distribution of pulmonic ingressive speech with regard to locality, gender, word/discourse particle, and voicing.

This paper problematizes the designation of China English (CE) as a developing variety of English. Fourteen Chinese tertiary English teachers participated in a discourse-based study, in which they completed, via dyadic discussion, an acceptability judgment test (AJT) that contains a selection of 10 features allegedly emblematic of CE. Examination of the teachers’ conversation shows that they did not associate these features with “China English”. Further analyses reveal that they tended to comment negatively on and reject those features they saw as unacceptable in standard Englishes (SEs) and accepted those they saw oppositely, due to their general alignment with SEs norms, except that on one occasion, one of them did challenge the native-speaker benchmark openly. Drawing on these findings, we argue that the notion of CE might still remain esoteric, and CE is facing a dilemma between lack of distinctness from SEs and stigmatization of its potentially most characteristic features. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A literary criticism is presented on the 1962 American fictional book "The Help," by Kathryn Stockett. Particular focus is given to the speech and English language dialect used by African Americans within the novel, including in regard to the relationship between the authenticity of dialect and African African culture and racial identity.

The article examines the forms of written English used in what is known as the Taunton Fragment (TF) and explores the possibility that this illustrates a transition between Old and Early Middle English. Topics discussed include the morphological, lexical, and syntactic aspects of the TF, author Mechthild Gretsch's research into the TF, and the various English language dialects represented in the TF.

In this paper, we analyse linguistic variables which are well-established in British English, the vowels in the trap and bath lexical sets. We demonstrate that the social meanings of these variables are both historically substantiated and locally-elaborated. Our data is taken from the speech of individuals living on the Isles of Scilly, a group of islands off the south-west coast of England. Our initial analysis shows that trap and bath variants found on the islands are linked to contact with Standard English English, on the one hand, and the nearest neighbouring variety of Cornish English, on the other. The general distribution of variants is shown to reflect educational differences amongst our speakers. However, two case studies show speakers using forms atypical of their education type in order to position themselves in interactionally-dynamic ways. This reveals how speakers exploit the multidimensional meanings of linguistic variants to reflect and construct local practices and alignments. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In British English (BrE), a subset of pronominal objects of prepositions in have/with possessives may be optionally realised as prepositional object gaps (POGs). In this short paper, we introduce three core properties of this previously unreported phenomenon, and then outline a preliminary syntactic analysis to straightforwardly capture them. These properties are: POGs are only observed in BrE, POGs are only observed in have/with possessives, and POGs are only observed in structurally simplex complements of possessive have and with. We show that these properties are straightforwardly captured by an analysis that treats POGs as arising from A-movement of the possessor. We claim that the locus of variation between dialects that permit POGs and dialects that do not is the feature specification of a single syntactic head, which either induces or precludes A-movement. This proposal accords with current Minimalist approaches to microparametric variation, in which all variation stems from the lexicon. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the use of a glossary compiled by Bishop White Kennett in the book "Glossary of North Country Words" by John T. Brockett. Topics discussed include the location of Kennett's glossary in the Landsdowne manuscript collection of the British Library, the role of Kennett's glossary in the history of English dialects, and the use of Kennett's work by Brockett for etymology and word sense.

A growing literature directly connects historical demographic patterns to the emergence of new dialects or languages. This article moves beyond the usual macro view of such data, relying on simple numbers of speakers and similar information, to focus on the input to new generations of speakers in a so-called substrate setting. The English now spoken in eastern Wisconsin shows a range of influences from German, and we work to reconstruct the kinds of input that the first large generation of English L1, mostly monolingual English-speaking children in the community,likely received at the level of the household and the individual. Evidence strongly suggests that most children in the community would have been widely exposed to heavily German-influenced English, in part due to a critical moment of shift from German to English as the home language in many households. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Making use of three data sets of Newfoundland English, this paper uncovers the linguistic and social motivations and strategies used by young speakers to reclaim and re-shape a traditional, local, relic language feature (verbal -s attachment, as in I goes). While each group that we discuss (young females, drag queens, and a sample of the Newfoundland population) is differently situated with respect to the broader local culture (i.e. they each have their own social identities), similarities and parallels in the reclamation and use of verbal -s indicate important processes that occur in the enregisterment and reappropriation of a salient, traditional linguistic form. Results indicate that the local social and linguistic reconstruction of a speech feature can change a path of decline and prove fertile ground for creating a unique identity that moves toward the global while still motioning to the past of a community. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents a discussion on teachers of Towson University, Maryland, U.S. misunderstanding of African American English (AAE) and Standard English (SE) while communicating with multilingual students and welcoming AAE later with clarification of its linguistics facts. It also talks about implementation of instructional approaches, comparison of AAE and SE, and history and linguistic features of AAE.

I use the results of my own research into the language use of the immigrant (or 'Stranger') communities in early modern Norwich to evaluate Peter Trudgill's thesis that it was language contact in Norwich between the Strangers and the local English inhabitants that led to the emergence of third-person singular present tense zero (he go rather than he goes). I present evidence that third-person singular zero was already in use in Norwich and elsewhere in Norfolk by the time when Dutch- and French-speaking immigrants arrived in Norwich. The question then arises as to whether language contact did in fact play any role in establishing zero-marking as the norm in the Norfolk dialect, a process which was complete by about 1700. I argue is that if language contact did play a role in the success of zeromarking, it would have been in a manner different to that described by Trudgill. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Despite the fact that varieties of Aboriginal English are widely used in communication in Aboriginal communities across Australia, the use of Aboriginal English in writing has been limited. A significant genre for Aboriginal writers has been the autobiographical narrative. In most published narratives of this genre, Aboriginal English has not been widely used. This paper describes and discusses an autobiographical narrative composed by Aboriginal author Glenys Collard and published by the Western Australian Department of Training and Workforce Development in 2011 in which the only medium of narration (except for utterances by non-Aboriginal characters) is Aboriginal English. Analysis of this text supports the view that Aboriginal English as depicted in metropolitan Perth exhibits significant linguistic and stylistic continuity with Aboriginal discourse in more remote settings. It is suggested that writing for Aboriginal English readership entails the emergence of a distinctive genre. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article presents a variationist analysis of the bought vowel in New York City English (NYCE) and finds that it has reversed the trajectory of change outlined in Labov (1966). An acoustic analysis of production data from sixty-four native residents of the Lower East Side demonstrates that bought is lowering in apparent time, a change led by young people, white and Jewish speakers, and the middle classes. A second source of data comes from perceptions of raised bought gathered from a matched guise experiment, which highlights an indexical field (Eckert 2008) of social meanings for raised bought that comprise a ‘classic New Yorker’ persona: an older, white ethnic New Yorker from the outer boroughs who is mean and aloof. Taken together, the data suggest that bought's reversal is motivated by its contemporary social meanings. (bought, New York City English, dialectology, variationism, sound change, social meaning, perception, sociophonetics)* [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The present study is a nationwide survey of language identity among English language learners in Iran. The participants who completed the survey in this research included 1851 English language learners from different parts of the country who belonged to different genders, age groups and English language proficiency levels. The main instrument was a validated questionnaire which included 19 items and was administered online and by hand. The results of this survey revealed that Iranian English language learners had a moderate level of language identity and there was no significant difference between the language identity of male and female participants. In addition, the results indicated that there were significant differences in the language identity of participants across different age groups (teenagers and adults) and language proficiency levels (low- and high-proficiency learners). Finally, the results showed that 73.3% of the participants preferred American English, followed by British English (23.6%), Persian English (1.6%), Canadian English (1.2%) and Australian English (0.3%) as their favourite varieties of English. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper explores the case of Ireland as an ante-litteram postcolonial context. Within this context, a main concern is that of the relationship between language and identity. Irish English (the variety of English spoken in Ireland) enjoys a unique position within the constellation of world-wide English varieties. Various factors led to the emergence of Irish English, it may well have developed as a resistance to the (contrasting) forces of colonialism and has been perceived as a different vehicle for communication when compared to received colonial English. Scholars now generally believe that Irish people, at a certain moment in time, decided to use a language which offered better possibilities for work. Via the analysis of some postcolonial issues, such as the linguistic crisis of the colonial subject, the paper will first illustrate the circumstances that led to the emergence of Irish English and then list the main features of this variety. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A literary criticism is presented of the book "Village Politics: To All the Mechanics, Journeymen, and Day Labourers in Great Britain," by Hannah More. Particular focus is given to the book's depiction of South-West England's rural poor people, including their political activity and writing. An overview of English rural poor people's dialect, including their pronunciation, is provided.

This paper explores stylized renderings of Singapore English as such 'verbal art' is used by Singaporean youth in popular online forums. In order to analyze these stylizations, this study uses corpora collected from two forums frequented by Singaporean students. The data suggests that posters often use stylized representations to perform or to ventriloquize the identity of an Ah Beng (a kind of hustler or gangster). Implicated in such performances are sometimes complex negotiations of class, gender, and ethnicity. The relationship among the linguistic features central to our study and the social meanings signaled by those features suggest the value of approaches that emphasize the range of pragmatic and metapragmatic meanings or indexicalities that accrue to features in modeling variation in Singapore English. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on the auxiliary contraction of Apalachee language towards the development of Smoky Mountains of North Carolina languages in 1939. Topics discussed includes research studies on Appalachian English, dominant form of glottal constriction and influences of British varieties of English. Other topics include the philogy of Modern English and the paradigms forms of Appalachian English.

The article explores the developments on the use of English speech as conversational discourse of politeness and dis-approval in Southeastern Kentucky. Topics discussed include the pragmatics and metapragmatics of English speech, contextual significant of English language and its cultural influences to rural residents of Kentucky. Other topics include the construction of moral ethics and contextual relations to Apalachee language.

An appendix is presented of notes on English language usage including stops, consonant durations, and phonemes from various articles in the issue.

An appendix is presented of voiced and unvoiced terms used by young, monodialectal Pennsylvania Dutchified English (PDE) speakers, as well as a language sample taken of a PDE speaker conversing with a South Central Pennsylvania English (SPCE) speaker.

The article discusses the long term contact between the Pennsylvania German, Pennsylvania Dutchified English (PDE), and South Central Pennsylvania English (SCPE) languages in south central Pennsylvania, focusing on the emergence of bidialectalism due to the obsolescence of PDE. Topics of the article include immigrant language communities, bidialectal speakers, and dialectal shift.

The article discusses the dialectal shift occurring in south central Pennsylvania, focusing on the emergence of bidialectalism as Pennsylvania Dutchified English (PDE) becomes obsolete. Topics of the article include a definition of bidialectalism, usage of South Central Pennsylvania English (SCPE), and speech patterns of bidialectal speakers.

The article discusses the phonological features of Pennsylvania Dutchified English (PDE), focusing on the vocalic features of consonant and vowel sounds. Topics of the article include phonological research on articulation variations such as monophthongization, voicing/devoicing, and centralization, dialectal shift, and the obsolescence of PDE.

The article examines the phonological features of Pennsylvania Dutchified English (PDE), focusing on the presence of obstruent consonant devoicing. Topics of the article include phonological research on PDE speakers in varying age groups, articulation of speech sounds such as voiced and devoiced sounds, and variation between PDE obstruents and South Central Pennsylvania English (SCPE) obstruents.

The article discusses Pennsylvania Dutchified English (PDE) and South Central Pennsylvania English (SCPE), focusing on describing and comparing the two dialects. Topics of the article include linguistic research, language variations such as lexical differences, monophthongization, and centralization of vowels, and emerging bidialectism as PDE becomes obsolete.

An introduction is presented in which the editor discusses various reports within the issue on topics including Pennsylvania Dutchified English, bidialectal speakers, and language variety shift and obsolescence.

The article discusses the outcomes of dialect contact, focusing on the case of Pennsylvania Dutchified English (PDE) in south central Pennsylvania. Topics of the article include variations in dialect contact, ethnolinguistics, and the status of the Pennsylvania German dialect in sectarian and nonsectarian communities.

While exocentric norms (e.g. British and American English) informed by a second language acquisition (SLA) perspective are prevalent in the Outer Circle, there is a growing recognition of local varieties of Englishes belonging to the world Englishes (WE) paradigm. However, what constitutes an error or a varietal feature is hard to decide, particularly in the absence of codification of non-native Englishes in many Outer Circle contexts. Yet, distinguishing between errors and varietal features is a pedagogical requirement for correcting learners' errors and nurturing their linguistic creativity. Although the WE literature suggests criteria to determine the status of neologisms, these have their limitations. On the other hand, insufficient attention has been given to the agency of English teachers who are in a critical position to mediate language standards and their variations. Against this background, this paper reports a small-scale study involving practising English teachers in Bangladesh to provide a pedagogical perspective on error/innovation issues. Acknowledging the underlying complexity, we argue that understanding teachers' perspectives should be seen as an important research agenda to address learner English/L2 variety issues in L2 pedagogy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]