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This study investigated whether and how pre-adolescent girls style-shift in Multicultural London English (MLE), a variety of English that is relatively new and potentially still changing. We looked at the extent to which five 11-year-old girls in a homework club in East London, where MLE is spoken, changed their pronunciations in different speech contexts. The results showed that the girls did indeed change their pronunciations in the different contexts (i.e. they style-shifted), and that the patterns of style-shifting varied between both the individual participants and the three vowels which were examined. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The area of East Anglia in which its traditional dialects are spoken has shrunk significantly over the past few decades and seen a marked decline in the use of traditional features. These include lack of -s marking on third-person singular forms (Kingston, 2000; Potter, 2018), as well as the long-standing distinction between those words descended from Middle English /ɔ:/ and /ɔu/, as in 'moan' vs 'mown', which failed to become homophonous as part of the Long Mid Mergers (Wells, 1982a). Like other relics, this distinction now only remains in East Anglia's more northern locales (Trudgill & Foxcroft, 1978; Trudgill, 2004; Butcher, 2019). This apparent 'dialect death' situation (Trudgill, 1986: 68) is the outcome of continued supralocalisation, a situation in which locally specific linguistic forms lose out to linguistic variants with greater socio-spatial currency, usually as a result of mobility and dialect contact (Britain, 2010). In East Anglia's case, Trudgill (2001) argues that dialect levelling has largely been driven by the impact of London and Home Counties varieties of English. This process is predicted to continue (Trudgill, 1986; Kingston, 2000), though is unlikely to be straightforward. Britain (2011) reports that substantial intra-regional differences are found in relation to route and rate of sound change in East Anglia. This calls for more comprehensive analyses of East Anglian English to better understand the workings of this 'heterogenous homogenisation' (Britain, 2011: 57), and how individual case studies relate to the overall shrinkage of the area in which traditional East Anglian dialects are spoken. This paper presents data in this vein from two studies undertaken in Suffolk, southern East Anglia. The first presents data on unstressed vowel tensing, which refers to the alternation between [ə] and [ɪ] in those unstressed syllables where /ɪ/ occurs in other varieties of Southern British English (SBE) e.g. 'carpet' [kɑ:pɪt] / [ka:pəʔ]. The second reports data on yod dropping, i.e. the absence of /j/ from sequences of C+/ju/ e.g. 'huge' [hju:dʒ] / [hu:dʒ]. Both variables are well known from descriptions of East Anglian dialects but, as we will see later, they appear to behave differently in this study of contemporary East Anglian English. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Sociolinguistic research has established that glottal realisations of the voiceless alveolar stop /t/ have become increasingly common in accents of British English. The phenomenon, known as T-glottalling, encompasses the production of word-final and word-medial /t/ using glottal articulations, including creaky voice, pre-glottalisation [ʔt] and glottal replacement [ʔ] (Straw & Patrick, 2007), so that words such as but [bʌt] and butter [bʌtə] may become [bʌʔ] and [bʌʔə] respectively. The change has been documented for some time in Scotland (Macafee, 1997) and Norfolk (Trudgill, 1999) but has since been reported in numerous locations across the UK (see Smith & Holmes–Elliott, 2018 for a recent review). Studies of regional dialect levelling (Kerswill, 2003) have argued that T-glottalling has spread from working-class London speech into neighbouring varieties of South East England and beyond as a form of geographical diffusion (Altendorf & Watt, 2004). Together with other variables showing similar sociolinguistic patterns, such as TH-fronting and L vocalisation, it has been identified as part of a set of 'youth norms' used by young people in many urban centres to index a trendy, youthful identity (Williams & Kerswill, 1999; Milroy, 2007; though see Watson, 2006 for an exception in Liverpool), which have elsewhere been referred to as 'Estuary English' (Rosewarne, 1984; Altendorf, 2017). In terms of perception, T-glottalling is described as highly salient and stigmatised, frequently attracting comments from lay speakers to the effect that it should be avoided (Wells, 1982; Bennett, 2012), to the extent that mainstream journalistic publications can identify and criticise its use by 'educated' speakers such as politicians (e.g. Littlejohn, 2011). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Situated at the extreme south west periphery of the British Isles, Cornwall's territorial isolation bred cultural isolation which has been construed and reconstrued over time, giving Cornwall a distinctive cultural flavour. Initially borne out by facts of geography, Cornwall, or 'Kernow', experiences a dynamic yet enduring peripheral existence (see Payton, 1992). This article explores how Anglo-Cornish dialect words can be used as a means of identity construction, that is, how a Cornish way of speaking is used to construct identities associated with a Cornish way of being. I hypothesise that those who desire greater Cornish autonomy are more likely to use Anglo-Cornish dialect lexis than those who favour further socio-cultural assimilation with England. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

East Anglian English was the first British variety of English to be subject to dialectological scrutiny using sociolinguistic techniques (Trudgill, 1974, and his subsequent work) and since then has been subject to only sporadic investigation (e.g. Britain, 1991, 2014a, 2014b, 2015; Kingston, 2000; Straw, 2006; Amos, 2011; Potter, 2012, 2018; Butcher, 2015). Recent research has suggested that, in those few locations that have been investigated, East Anglian English is gradually losing some of its traditional dialect features, in favour of forms from the South East more generally. Kingston (2000), Britain (2014a) and Potter (2018) all found, for example, a rather steep decline in the use of East Anglia's traditional third-person present-tense zero. Furthermore, we are aware of the arrival into East Anglia of linguistic innovations from the South East of England, such as TH fronting (Trudgill, 1988; Britain, 2005; Potter, 2012) and /l/ vocalisation (Johnson & Britain, 2007; Potter, 2014), but we only know about their success in a few parts of the region – Norwich, East Suffolk and the Fens. Since Trudgill's investigations across East Anglia in the 1970s, however (e.g. Trudgill & Foxcroft, 1978), and despite a few multilocality studies (Britain, 1991, 2014a; Potter, 2018) no research has been able to provide a picture of the state of the traditional dialect across the whole region. We have therefore only a patchy understanding of the extent to which traditional dialect obsolescence, dialect levelling and innovation diffusion have impacted the dialect landscape of this region as a whole. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Dialects in the South East of England are very often perceived as one homogenous mass, without much regional variation. Rosewarne introduced the notion of Estuary English and defined it as 'variety of modified regional speech [ . . . ] a mixture of non-regional and local south-eastern English pronunciation and intonation' (Rosewarne, 1984). However, studies such as Przedlacka (2001) and Torgersen & Kerswill (2004) have shown that, at least on the phonetic level, distinct varieties exist. Nevertheless, very few studies have investigated language use in the South East and even fewer in the county of Sussex. It is often claimed that there is no distinct Sussex dialect (Coates, 2010: 29). Even in the earliest works describing the dialect of the area (Wright, 1903) there are suggestions that it cannot be distinguished from Hampshire in the west and Kent in the east. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the last few decades, something has changed about how Americans conceive of privacy, which has had consequences for how writers address their publics: how writers write. This essay argues that rapidly evolving and expanding surveillance regimes have profoundly affected our sense of where the private life begins and ends and what can or cannot be concealed from others. Discourses characterized by fragmentation, opacity, and indirection have become both a means by which we communicate information about ourselves to the larger world and a mimetic representation of how that surveillance-mediated world often appears to us. Literature has played a crucial role in these transformations and has served as a laboratory for many of these emerging discourses. This essay focuses on two recent and contrasting cohorts of American writers: a slightly older group of authors who saw the sacrifice of individual privacy as having catastrophic implications for liberal democracy, and a younger group whose views of privacy and communication were, on the whole, less panicked and more tactical. The essay concludes by considering what happens when rhetorical modes meant primarily to preserve the private self reenter the public sphere and assert themselves within a civil-minded conversation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We present a method enabling the unsupervised discovery of sub-word units (SWUs) and associated pronunciation lexicons for use in automatic speech recognition (ASR) systems. This includes a novel SWU discovery approach based on self-organising HMM-GMM states that are agglomeratively tied across words as well as a novel pronunciation lexicon induction approach that iteratively reduces pronunciation variation by means of model pruning. Our approach relies only on recorded speech and associated orthographic transcriptions and does not require alphabetic graphemes. We apply our methods to corpora of recorded radio broadcasts in Ugandan English, Luganda and Acholi, of which the latter two are under-resourced. The speech is conversational and contains high levels of background noise, and therefore presents a challenge to automatic lexicon induction. We demonstrate that our proposed method is able to discover lexicons that perform as well as baseline expert systems for Acholi, and close to this level for the other two languages when used to train DNN-HMM ASR systems. This demonstrates the potential of the method to enable and accelerate ASR for under-resourced languages for which a phone inventory and pronunciation lexicon are not available by eliminating the dependence on human expertise this usually requires. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The use of gendered pronouns with inanimate noun referents, such as referring to line and pipe as she and to bag or lid as he, has been described as typical for Shetland dialect. In light of recent discussion on the shift from Shetland dialect to Standard English, presumably triggered by the sociodemographic changes brought on by the oil industry, this study investigates the gender system in both the pre-oil and post-oil speech of the variety. Using a database of over 368,000 words of oral history material and a sample of elicited contemporary speech, it is shown that the choice of gender correlates with a number of linguistic and social variables. Furthermore, the study shows that the use of gendered pronouns with inanimate nouns is a robust and stable feature of contemporary Shetland dialect. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the behaviour of one linguistic feature among one black and one white group of Bermudian men over the age of 50. The acoustic analysis of the mouth vowel, one of the most heavily stereotyped sounds of Bermudian English, is used as a window onto linguistic parody observed in the white group, a community of practice known locally for theatrical dialect performance. In combination with contextual analysis, and in light of social conditions in Bermuda, phonetic findings suggest that this linguistic practice is not only a performance of "Bermudian‐ness," but also a performance of a racialized stereotype which reflects and reinforces the raciolinguistic hierarchies of contemporary Bermudian society. The paper introduces this under‐researched and unusual sociolinguistic setting to the literature on racialized mock language, as well as attesting further to the usefulness of methods that examine highly self‐conscious speech. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Pakistani English is considered to be a distinct variety of English on the basis of its comparison with British English and American English. However, this claim is partial as its distinction from other varieties of English particularly used in South Asia has not yet been established. Thus, there is a need to investigate the similarities and differences between Pakistani and South Asian Englishes, and to analyse how far Pakistani English is distinct from other South Asian Englishes. Therefore, the present study aims at analyzing the linguistic features of Pakistani English as a separate variety from other varieties of English used in India and Bangladesh. For this purpose, a corpus of Pakistani, Indian and Bangladeshi English newspaper reportage was developed and analyzed using Biber's (1988) multivariate/multidimensional approach. The findings indicated that Pakistani press reportage is different from Indian and Bangladeshi press reportage on all the five dimensions, especially on Dimension 2, in which Pakistani press reportage is narrative, while Bangladeshi press reportage is non-narrative in nature. On Dimension 3, the press reportage of Pakistan is highly explicit as compared to Indian and Bangladeshi press reportage. Further, the sub-categories of Pakistani press reportage also exhibit variation when compared to the sub-categories of Indian and Bangladeshi press reportage. The possible causes of linguistic variation among these countries are their culture and geographical origin. It is further suggested that South Asian Englishes are evolving rapidly and linguistic variation among them certainly be a worth researchable area. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The slang name for Canadian dollar loonie is a Canadianism used not only in spoken (Boberg, 2010: 121), but also in written texts such as Canadian news articles. While loonie is obviously taken for granted by Canadians, its occurrence in English texts published beyond Canada has hardly been in the focus of corpus-based studies. The goal of this study is to find out in what Canadian English written texts loonie occurs and whether it is encountered in the other varieties of English by researching the corpora adapted for web access at Brigham Young University (BYU), the Strathy Corpus of Canadian English (SCCE), the Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA) and the corpus of Global Web-Based English (GloWbE). The first two corpora were searched to reveal the genres of the written texts loonie occurs and GloWbE - to see loonie used in the other varieties of English. The obtained results revealed that loonie occurs in such written texts as newspaper and magazine articles of SCCE and COCA predominantly in the contexts connected with money issues. Search of GloWbE showed the use of loonie in American and British mass media texts, which reveals that this Canadian slang name goes beyond Canadian texts and thus, as Davies (2005: 45) has stated '[...] few of us are cocooned from [...] vocabulary of the major international varieties of English'. These findings therefore call for more detailed research of the collocations containing loonie in various text types of different varieties of English. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Speech perception abilities vary substantially across listeners, particularly in adverse conditions including those stemming from environmental degradation (e.g., noise) or from talker-related challenges (e.g., nonnative or disordered speech). This study examined adult listeners' recognition of words in phrases produced by six talkers representing three speech varieties: a nonnative accent (Spanish-accented English), a regional dialect (Irish English), and a disordered variety (ataxic dysarthria). Semantically anomalous phrases from these talkers were presented in a transcription task and intelligibility scores, percent words correct, were compared across the three speech varieties. Three cognitive-linguistic areas-receptive vocabulary, cognitive flexibility, and inhibitory control of attention-were assessed as possible predictors of individual word recognition performance. Intelligibility scores for the Spanish accent were significantly correlated with scores for the Irish English and ataxic dysarthria. Scores for the Irish English and dysarthric speech, in contrast, were not correlated. Furthermore, receptive vocabulary was the only cognitive-linguistic assessment that significantly predicted intelligibility scores. These results suggest that, rather than a global skill of perceiving speech that deviates from native dialect norms, listeners may possess specific abilities to overcome particular types of acoustic-phonetic deviation. Furthermore, vocabulary size offers performance benefits for intelligibility of speech that deviates from one's typical dialect norms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As a result of the global presence of English as a Lingua Franca (ELF), it has been argued that learners of English should be exposed to a range of varieties of English, rather than a single variety of English, so that they can be better prepared to communicate with other people in ELF communication. However, little is known about second language (L2) learners' perspectives on exposure to multiple accents of English in the English Language Teaching (ELT) classroom. This paper reports on a study that investigated the views of L2 learners of English concerning exposure to different accents of English in the classroom. Data were collected by means of semi-structured interviews and a questionnaire survey at a university in Hong Kong. The analysis revealed that these L2 learners showed rather ambivalent attitudes towards exposure to different accents of English in the classroom. While many participants seemed to be aware of the value of exposure to different native and non-native accents, there was less than wholehearted support for such a proposal in practice because of a number of pedagogical and practical concerns. Implications of the findings for classroom teaching are also discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper focuses on the 'intrusive as'-construction in complex-transitive verb complementation which was so far only attested for Indian English. Our data show that 'intrusive as' is a common feature in South Asian Englishes generally, albeit to different degrees. Comparing the South Asian data with data from Learner Englishes allows to test several hypotheses concerning the origin of 'intrusive as'; the most robust correlation within the data points to redundancy as a motivating factor for both ESL and EFL contexts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, I examine the different conversational and interactional functions that High Rising Terminals ( HRT) fulfil among young, White, middle-class speakers of London English. Data are drawn from sixteen small-group interviews with forty-two individuals (28 women and 14 men) aged 18-25. From this corpus, 7351 declarative Intonation Phrases were extracted, and auditorily coded for the presence/absence of HRT as well as for a variety of social, interactional and pragmatic factors. I combine quantitative and qualitative methods to demonstrate that while all of the speakers investigated use HRT to accomplish relational work in conversation, the specific interactional strategies that the feature is recruited to perform differ markedly across genders. I consider the ramifications of this finding for our understanding of 'politeness' as a gendered practice, and illustrate the importance of examining a variable like HRT in its discourse-functional context. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

ABSTRACT It has been observed (Nihalani et al. 1979; Yadurajan 2001) that Indian English differs from other varieties of English in that it allows 'intrusive as' in complex-transitive constructions, especially with the verbs call, name and term. However, the construction is not restricted to Indian English, but represents a pan-South Asian feature that is gaining ground in the written language across South Asian varieties of English. This paper will provide a corpus-based analysis of the forms, functions and distribution of 'intrusive as'-constructions in South Asian Englishes, and consider possible motivations for this innovation in verb complementation patterns. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

ABSTRACT With the help of a survey building on 13 bipolar pairs arranged on a six-point semantic differential scale, the present paper studies Indian English speakers' attitudes towards their local variety Indian English contrastively by simultaneously examining their attitudes towards American English, British English and Sri Lankan English. The results show that although Indian speakers of English display a positive attitude towards Indian English, which is most pronounced with the group of young female informants possibly leading an ongoing linguistic change in India, the informants view British English in a more favourable light. In addition, Indian English speakers show the least positive attitude towards Sri Lankan English, which may be an indication of mutual attitudinal demarcation between the two neighbour varieties. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

ABSTRACT This paper presents a study of the pronunciation of English by speakers from Yunnan Province in Southwest China. Eight non-English major undergraduate students participated in three tasks: an informal interview, reading a text, and a dialectological-style questionnaire. The degree of rhoticity was assessed based on auditory analysis, with an inter-rater agreement of 97 per cent. The results revealed significant inter-speaker variation: two informants were virtually non-rhotic whereas the remaining six were rhotic to a considerable degree. Intra-speaker variation among these six was furthermore systematic: the degree of rhoticity was lowest in the interview, intermediate in reading, and highest in the questionnaire. These results are discussed with reference to several factors, including the level of formality and attention to speech triggered by the tasks, potentially emerging norms for rhoticity, and the stage of development of a local form of 'Yunnan English'. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

ABSTRACT This paper presents findings of an acoustic investigation of monophthong vowels produced by learners of English from Yunnan, China. Speech data for the present study were collected from 15 participants comprising five Han Chinese English majors, five Han Chinese non-English majors and five Yi minority ethnic English majors. The findings show that the three groups share more differences than similarities in terms of vowel duration but not in terms of vowel quality though the results of Euclidean distance show that the Han Chinese English majors and the Han Chinese non-English majors are different from the Yi minority ethnic English majors. Results of standard deviation reveal that the Yi minority ethnic English majors have the lowest inter-speaker variability, followed by the Han Chinese English majors and the Han Chinese non-English majors. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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]

Copyright of Zeitschrift für Kanada-Studien is the property of Gesellschaft fuer Kanada Studien e.V. and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

The demographic dominance of 'non-native' speakers of English and the growing recognition of world Englishes (WE) call for critical examinations of varieties of English underpinning international proficiency tests. Expectedly, there has been an ongoing debate between those who argue for British and American norms and those who argue for all English norms including WE in international tests. While this welcome debate may develop awareness of WE issues among stakeholders, there has been little research on test-takers and their perspectives on the relevance of WE to high-stakes tests. This paper reports on data from an International English Language Testing System (IELTS) study to explore two questions: (1) How do IELTS test-takers perceive the relevance of WE to the test and why? (2) What are the implications of their perceptions for WE research? Analyses of quantitative and qualitative data show test-takers' mixed views and attitudes: While the majority of them supported WE in an abstract, ideological sense, they were against the inclusion of WE in the test for reasons related to maintaining standards, fairness, equality and test-taker interests. A critical discussion of the findings is undertaken to draw out implications for WE and WE researchers in the context of the dominance of English tests and their hegemonic discourses. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study explores the attitudes of English teachers, both Korean and non-Korean, towards 'Korean English' (KoE) in South Korea. Data about these attitudes were collected via 204 questionnaires and 25 post-survey individual interviews, from two major regions, Busan Gyeongnam and Seoul Gyeonggi, and were analysed both qualitatively and quantitatively. The results indicate that the majority of participants displayed a positive attitude towards KoE, especially regarding to the 'cognitive' component of attitude, while they showed 'confused' and 'conflicting' attitudes in the behavioural element. The unique features of KoE, its intelligibility, demographic and widespread use of KoE were perceived by participants as the most influential factors shaping their cognitive attitudes towards the language. Language variation and an acceptance of a pluralistic model of English language norms played a critical role in developing positive attitudes towards KoE in both the cognitive and behavioural components of participants' attitudes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper responds to calls to (i) approach varieties of English as a native (ENL), second (ESL) and foreign (EFL) language in an integrated fashion, and (ii) widen the scope of world Englishes analyses to the Expanding Circle. It describes the development of the Corpus of 'Dutch English', the first Expanding Circle corpus incorporating all text types in the written components of the ICE corpora. This corpus has implications for the description of English in the Netherlands in particular and for the investigation of ESL and EFL varieties in general. The paper then reports on a case study of the progressive aspect in this corpus compared to several ENL and ESL varieties. The results show no strict divide between the ESL varieties and the Corpus of Dutch English, which in fact displayed characteristics of both EFL and ESL. These findings provide further evidence in favour of an ESL-EFL continuum rather than a strict divide between varietal types. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

World Englishes (henceforth WEs) theory recognizes that English today is an international language that comprises ‘a unique cultural pluralism, and a linguistic heterogeneity and diversity’ (Kachru, 1985: 14). That is, WEs theory recognizes and appreciates an emerging group of English varieties worldwide (such as Australian English, Indian English, Singaporean English, etc.), seeing each as being of equal validity and legitimacy. This appreciation of the pluricentricity of English has aroused particular interest in the field of ESL/EFL teaching (e.g., Kachru, 1992; Jenkins, 2006; Kirkpatrick, 2008). It is well known that ESL/EFL teaching has long been dominated by the Inner Circle model (Kachru, 1985), also known as the native speaker (NS) model. The Inner Circle model of English teaching focuses on so-called ‘Standard English’ education and aims to develop ‘native-like proficiency’ among ESL/EFL learners. Such a monocentric approach posits the superiority of Anglo-American norms and cultures at the expense of other English varieties and cultures. However, criticisms of such an ‘exonormative native speaker model’ (Kirkpatrick, 2008: 184) have been frequently raised in the past decade, and a growing number of researchers (e.g., Kachru, 1986, 1992; Canagarajah, 1999; Jenkins, 2000, 2006; Seidlhofer, 2001; McKay, 2002; Kirkpatrick, 2006, 2008) have called for a paradigm shift to replace the monocentric Inner Circle model in ESL/EFL teaching. New models have also been proposed; for instance, Phillipson (1992a) argued for models in various specific English varieties that maintain international intelligibility; Kramsch (1998) proposed an intercultural speaker model, and Kirkpatrick (2008) advocated a lingua franca approach to replace the NS model; finally, Jenkins (2006) put forward the pluricentric approach to replace the monocentric approach in English teaching. Though different in some respects, these proposed new models all share the same aims for ESL/EFL teaching, that is, to promote pluralism in different cultures and English varieties, to raise ESL/EFL learners' awareness of the various English varieties, and to enhance ESL/EFL learners' confidence in their own English varieties. In this study, the term pluricentric approach is adopted because this term vividly catches the essence of the pluricentricity of English today. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

What makes the Expanding Circle Englishes real rather than abstract varieties? This article highlights that it is culture that makes the specifics of an English variety whereas linguistic features might be shared by a number of other varieties. Russian English as a linguistic entity is based on the specifics of Russian culture and mentality revealed on all language levels, lexical and phonetic levels being the most noticeable. The negative attitude towards the concept of Russian English can be accounted for by a) the theoretical confusion of the variety with its only one lectal subtype (taking the basilect for the variety), while any variety is a complex and a continuum of several lects; b) scholars' understanding of a dynamic and functional variety characteristic of a speech community as an interlanguage of an individual with a fossilized level of language competence, and c) ignoring the fact that any variety expresses the cultural mentality in real life discourse. Change in the attitude in the speech community occurs with the gradual overcoming of these misunderstandings, which takes a fairly long time. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Small Caribbean islands offer a unique venue for examining principles of language contact and sociolinguistic variation. Only recently, however, has the use of acoustics-based analysis been incorporated as a tool for the phonological description and analysis of Caribbean varieties. This study offers the first empirical description and analysis of the English spoken on the island of Saba, a Dutch municipality located in the Eastern Caribbean. Data come from 22 sociolinguistic interviews with long-term residents conducted on Saba in 2012. Phonological and morphosyntactic features are analyzed with respect to the interrelationship between effects from community, ethnicity, and generation. Overall, this study contributes to the important process of phonological and morphosyntactic documentation of lesser-known Caribbean varieties, highlighting the usefulness of acoustics-based and statistical analyses in such processes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Íkala: Revista de Lenguaje y Cultura is the property of Universidad de Antioquia and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

This research explores perceptions of linguistic variation in English in Washington state (WA). Respondents marked on a map of WA the places where they believe people’s English sounds “different” and provided a label for that type of English. The analysis of the results used digital tools to create composite maps consisting of (1) respondents’ spatial perceptions of English in WA, (2) spatial perceptions of English in WA according to different demographic groups, and (3) affective values associated with regions identified by respondents. The results suggest that Washingtonians perceive that urban areas and eastern WA are places where English is different. The results also demonstrate that when respondents are surveyed about variation within their own state rather than variation across the country, local types of organizational categories, such as an urban/rural dichotomy or belief in a regional standard, can emerge. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This study explores the system of progressive aspect marking in educated adult speakers of Nigerian English (NigE), which has been claimed to differ distinctly from that of other varieties of English. A total of 4,813 progressive constructions drawn from the International Corpus of English (ICE)–Nigeria were analyzed and compared with data from the ICE–Great Britain and previous studies. In addition, the acceptability of progressive constructions was tested in a questionnaire study. The results show both distinct stylistic variation in the use of progressives in NigE and some systematic differences from their use in British English. The corpus-based study further reveals some extended use of the progressive in NigE such as in connection with verbs referring to habitual nonbounded durative activities or stative verbs. Many of these patterns of extended use might be explained by referring to the interplay between aspects of first and second language usage (such as that of Igbo and English). Results from the questionnaire survey suggest that only a subgroup of these extended progressives is considered acceptable by NigE speakers. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The article focuses on American English language variations in the terms used to refer to dragonflies, or Odonata, in the U.S. and discusses the Linguistic Atlas Project (LAP) and the Linguistic Atlas of the Middle and South Atlantic States (LAMSAS). The most commonly used terms for the dragonfly are listed including snake doctor, darning needle, mosquito hawk, snake feeder, and skeeter hawk. The impact of folklore on the variation of the word dragonfly is discussed.

The global diffusion of English and the resultant birth of its varieties have had various sociolinguistic impacts. The present socio-economic-linguistic situation is such that communities need to communicate as never before. In the matter of communication in English the native speaker had an upper hand as the other variety speakers were expected to understand him. However, the elevated status of the non-native varieties of English and the financial emergence of many onetime third world countries, such as China and India have, if not subverted, balanced the situation. This paper attempts to throw some light on how intelligibility is perceived differently today. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A well-known marker of the difference between British and American English is the choice between “fall” or “autumn” for the third season of the year. This note explores the evolution of the difference, and suggests that “fall” may have had an original reference to the seasonal discoloration, rather than to the dropping, of leaves. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper argues that Negative Concord is generated by the grammars of all English varieties, but just not 'realized' in the standardized variety, in the sense of Barbiers (2005, 2009). I show that Double Negation constructions, wherein two negative elements yield a doubly negated meaning, are formed identically by English varieties that realize Negative Concord and those that do not. Unlike previous Minimalist Agree approaches to English Negative Concord, this proposal accounts for the fact that English varieties generate both Double Negation and Negative Concord constructions. This paper employs Tortora's (2009, in press) mechanism of feature spreading, and López's (2009) derivational assignment of the pragmatic feature [contrast], to successfully capture the facts of Negative Concord and Double Negation in English. In so doing, it contributes insight into the representation of sentential negation, and supports the Barbiersian notion that not all grammatical structures are realized in a given variety. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Use of the associative plural form '...and them' in English is discussed. It is found in Gullah, a form of African American Vernacular English; in North Preston and Guysborough Enclave in Nova Scotia; and in York, Wheatley Hill and Buckie in Britain.

ABSTRACT: Although the study and description of the structural levels of Sri Lankan English as a variety of English in its own right have so far been in the centre of a limited number of small-scale investigations only, the sociolinguistic scenery in Sri Lanka has attracted more national and international scholarly attention. In this context, most of the sociolinguistic studies with a special focus on attitudes towards English in Sri Lanka did not differentiate between attitudes towards individual varieties of English, but conducted their investigations under the umbrella term English in Sri Lanka. Against this background, the present study examines attitudes towards Sri Lankan English, Indian English, British English and American English in Sri Lanka with the help of an attitudinal survey based on bipolar semantic differential scales and correlates the results with relevant metainformation. While the findings of the survey indicate that British English continues to be a variety of English which is highly valued in Sri Lanka, the informants also display a positive attitude towards Sri Lankan English; a finding with conceptual implications regarding variety-status of Sri Lankan English and relevance for future language planning activities in Sri Lanka. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Mainstream attitudes to language have shifted from a basically normative and prescriptive orientation to one that celebrates actual performance and variation. This article discusses where this leaves the issue of linguistic deviations (including shortcomings). The basic theoretical framework is evolutionary theory, extended to include cultural evolution. This makes it possible to consider (in a theoretically well-founded manner) a key factor that tends to be underestimated in relation to language: the role of selection pressures as a feature of the sociocultural environment. Based on examples from a reality show (Amalies verden), the article considers in what different ways utterances may be classed as deviant from the perspective of function-based structure and discusses to what extent the recognition of a community langue as a source of adaptive pressure may throw light on different types of deviation, including language handicaps and learner errors. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper is about variation and how to make sense of it. It takes as its material a construction that has been treated as a new part of the system of Danish and Swedish, viz. theplus at‘plus that’ construction. The corpus I have used to evaluate claims about this construction is the LANCHART corpus of spoken Danish from 1970 to 2010. The data from the LANCHART corpus show that the construction has a specific use (and function), that not very many informants use it and that those who do overwhelmingly use only one instance. Thus, the construction may safely be said to be marginal at least in the corpus data. The issue is how to theorize this. This is the theme of the final section. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article argues that American English before the twentieth century has been significantly under-documented, even in works like the Dictionary of American English, because of the inaccessibility of manuscript evidence, specifically from personal correspondence. It outlines a recently initiated project, the Corpus of American Civil War Letters (CACWL), which provides such evidence from the letters and diaries of little-educated soldiers in the conflict and their family members on the home front. In examining two compounds involving all (the pronoun you all 'you (plural)' and the preposition all to 'except for'), the article demonstrates the usefulness of a large body of manuscripts to establish the general currency of the first form in the American South by i860 and to identify the first known usages of the second form in American English. This initial case study confirms the value of both CACWL and the Southern Plantation Overseers Corpus for both lexicography and for documenting the history of the English language. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]