Language change and variation
For use with Chapter 2 of:
Galloway, N. and Rose, H. (2015). Introducing
Global Englishes. Routledge.
© Dr. Heath Rose and Dr. Nicola Galloway
Review of Lecture 1
• English has been under constant change, particularly
when coming into contact with other languages:
– e.g. Olde English changed considerably after contact with
Norman French.
• As English spread around the world, changes happened
as English came in to contact with new languages.
• Globalization has caused further linguistic change.
• Estimates of numbers and categorizing speakers is
problematic.
• This lecture continues to introduce key introductory
concepts for subsequent lectures.
Overview
Language change and contact
Levels of variation
Pidgins and creoles
Language standardization, ownership, and identity
Introductory activities
Look at the examples of variation in English in the introduction to Chapter 2,
then discuss the questions below.
1.
2.
Why do you think English vocabulary is often different in different parts of the
world?
What are the origins of the following words? (Answers are in Section 2a.)
passport, rucksack, agenda, coffee, species, mathematics, castle, skipper,
cliché, keel, guerrilla (warfare), nationalism, piano, pyjamas, shampoo,
gymnasium, hamburger, algebra, sky
3.
4.
5.
Do you know of other loan words from your own first language, or other
languages you know?
Lexical change does not only involve single words, but can involve longer phrases
and idioms. Some context-specific English phrases include ‘lucky money’ in Hong
Kong. Can you think of any examples from your own context that people
unfamiliar to your context may have difficulty understanding?
How is variation in the Englishes around the world perceived, in a positive or
negative manner?
Part 1
Language change and contact
Language change
• Language change affects:
– Pronunciation, orthography (spelling), grammar, vocabulary, and
pragmatics (language in use).
• Rate of change can be:
– Substantial or small
– Sudden or gradual
– On one occasion or incremental.
• Diachronic change refers to changes over a long period of time:
– e.g. the inflectional changes in English:
•
•
•
•
work, wrought, worked
cwen, queen, cwene
scip, ships, scipu
hund, dogs, hundas
– 1600 – choice of forming the plural was made simpler to mainly -(e)s and
-(e)n.
• formula, formulas, formulae
• datas, datum
Diachronic language change
Language change can be:
– Internally driven changes (endogenous)
– Externally driven changes (exogenous).
• Examples of endogenous change involve:
– Making optimal use of the available articulatory space, stabilization,
regularization and simplification, and giving distinct formal expression to
distinct meanings – hlafordum, lord, dropping of ‘s’.
• Examples of exogenous change involve deliberate changes in language:
– Attitudes of what is ‘correct’, ‘acceptable’, ‘incorrect’, ‘unacceptable’
– Great Vowel Shift (driven in part by regional accents in contact with more
upper class accents)
– Thus, exogenous language change is also related to social prestige and
desirability and, therefore, to identity.
• Trudgill’s (1986) accommodation theory suggests people vary language to
increase or decrease social distance.
• Language change also happens when new realities require description:
– science and empiricism – borrowing from Latin (altitude), Arabic (e.g. alcohol
and algebra), Greek (diagonal).
Synchronic language change
Changes are still taking place as English comes into contact with other
languages.
Different realities are also experienced in different contexts, which
results in lexical change – new physical, environmental, social, or
cultural situations.
• Code-switching occurs when multilingual speakers
switch between different languages or varieties.
• Code-mixing is the transfer of linguistic items from
one language into another in multilingual speech.
• Borrowing is when items from another language
or variety might begin to be used with increased
frequency and undergo some kind of assimilation
into the new language.
French (army, nationalism, court)
Latin (agenda, September, mile, species)
Greek (mathematics, democracy)
Old Norse (sky, troll)
Norman (castle, kennel)
Dutch (skipper, keel)
Spanish (guerrilla warfare)
Italian (piano, balcony, umbrella)
Indian (pajamas, bungalow, shampoo)
German (hamburger, rucksack)
Arabic (coffee, muslin)
Language contact can come in a range of intensity
•
•
‘Light, superficial contact’ (Schneider, 2011, p. 27–28) + influence = lexical borrowing.
More intense contact = structural interferences, as well as changes in morphology and syntax.
Contact-induced change:
The emergence of the ‘New’ Englishes
• Englishes – English is a dynamic, multifarious, and
pluricentric entity:
– Investigation and description of various national varieties (see
Kachru et al., 2006), particularly in the OC
– Phonology, lexicon, syntax, pragmatics, discourse, and literary
creativity
– Distinct from native or ‘standard’ norms, i.e. ‘accepted’ norms
– Attempts at codification provide a formal record of a variety –
significant process in legitimizing WE varieties
– ‘English Language Complex’ (Mesthrie and Bhatt, 2008) – core
lexicon, shared pronunciation features and grammatical
structures
– Differences that attract attention.
Characteristics of ‘New’ Englishes
New Englishes are far from uniform in their characteristics and current
use, although they do share certain features:
• Usually developed through the education system in places where
English was not the main language.
• In these postcolonial territories, English was initially only spoken by
the colonizers.
• Once schools were established and English was used as a medium of
instruction, and as time went on, local English teachers were
recruited who used varieties of English influenced by their mother
tongue, causing the differences in English varieties to become more
marked.
(Platt, Weber and Lian, 1984)
Kachru (1992b, p. 56) outlines three phases (not mutually exclusive):
1. Non-recognition
2. Local variety side by side with imported one but viewed as ‘inferior’
3. Local variety becomes recognized as the norm.
The status of ‘New’ Englishes
English ‘is not distributed, as a set of established encoded forms, unchanged
into different domains of use’ (Widdowson, 1997, p. 139); not a ‘franchise
language’ (Widdowson, 1997, p. 140).
Shaped by contact with indigenous languages – localized, nativized.
Are ‘New’ Englishes: varieties, Englishes, dialects, or languages?
• Kirkpatrick (2007), Mufwene (2001) and Schneider (2003): all varieties of
English develop in similar ways – problem with labelling the ‘New’
Englishes as ‘nativized’ and IC varieties as ‘native’ – ignore the existence of
languages that preceded it, e.g. Celtic language.
• Varieties of English are often classed as ‘native’ if they have been around
for a long time and have influenced younger varieties of English in some
way (Kirkpatrick, 2007). But what is ‘a long time?’
• A third criterion may relate to prejudice and one’s image of a ‘native
speaker’ (Kirkpatrick, 2007, p. 6): all varieties as ‘nativized’ – influenced by
local cultures and languages.
Variation in the EC and ELF usage
• WE: identification of varieties of English in specific geographical
regions.
• ELF: no focus on ‘fixed’ speech communities, but on how English is
used in more virtual and transient contexts worldwide. English is
seen as a contact language where ‘both the community of speakers
and the location can be changing and are often not associated with
a specific nation’ (Cogo and Dewey, 2012, p. 97) and speech
communities are ever-changing; no focus on geography or on
identifying core features.
• GE: includes both the WE and the ELF research paradigms.
Part 2
Levels of variation
Variety, dialect, accent, language, or
register?
• Variety: group-specific, nation-based language forms.
• Dialect: a geographical subdivision of a language form, usually
associated with a region (‘regional dialect’) or a class or a group
(‘social dialect’) – class, ethnic group, age group, and gender.
• Dialect cannot be used to describe the various Englishes worldwide.
African American English, for example, does not fit the criterion of
regionality.
• Accent: pronunciation (dialect includes its grammar and
vocabulary) – the two often go hand in hand, but dialect often has
negative connotations.
• Register: stylistically defined language varieties or situational
contexts.
Levels of
variation
Vocabulary
Sound
Spelling
Phonemic
variation
Consonants
Grammarsyntactic
Prosodic
variation
Vowels
Stress
Intonation
Pragmatics
Phonemic variation
Inner Circle
Outer and Expanding Circles
Many phonemic mergers and splits:
• In Britain (except south-west
England), the vowel in bother and
lot is a rounded low back vowel,
symbolized as /ɒ/. This is distinct
from the /ɑː/ in father and palm.
However, in most varieties of North
American English these vowels are
pronounced the same so that bomb
and balm have identical
pronunciations and bother rhymes
with father (Seigel, 2010, p. 14).
• Despite having the same number of
phonemes, RP and GE sound very
different.
Kachru and Smith (2008, p. 81):
• many varieties simplify the diphthongs
and triphthongs of the British variety,
e.g.:
– ei>e as in paid
– ou>o as in bowl
• stressed and unstressed vowels are not
distinguished, i.e. there is no reduction
of vowel in the unstressed syllable
• individual consonants are also
pronounced differently throughout the
world, e.g.:
– ‘t’ sound often sounds like a /d/
– In India, the ‘t’ sound may not be
aspirated and they frequently
retroflex.
Variation in prosodic (suprasegmental) features:
• Added vowels to pronounce consonant clusters (sutopu)
• Rhythm is also characteristic of Indian English.
Lexical variation
Conversion – in west
Variety-specific
compounds
Same meaning,
different words
(salary man)
(jumper)
Semantic extension –
in southern Africa, robots
means traffic lights
(Kamwangamalu, 2001,
p. 57)
Semantic narrowing –
in Middle English, a girl
was a young person of
either sex
Compounding/speciali
zed meaning – in South
Derivation – in Ghana,
Abbreviation – in
Blending – distripark
enstool and destool
(Jenkins, 2009b)
Australia, arvo
(a distribution park or a
warehouse complex) in
Singapore
Acronyms – Singapore
and Malaysia: MC
(medical certificate)
Africa, off means to
switch off (Melchers and
Shaw, 2011, p. 24)
Africa rainbow-X
(Kamwangamalu, 2001,
p. 54)
Coinages – Singapore:
killer litter
Physical
landscape
(places, rivers,
mountains, flora
and fauna)
Animals
Physical objects
(kangaroo in
Australia)
(chopsticks from
China)
Borrowing
Social standing
and customs
(Nawabs in
Pakistan – an
Indian ruler
during Mogul
empires)
Food (sushi from
Japan)
Clothing
(sarong from
Malaysia)
• Locally coined idioms and word-by-word
translations of indigenous phrases (to shake legs in
Malaysia, coming from the Malay idiom goyang kaki,
meaning to be idle (Jenkins, 2009b).
• Variation in the use of NES idioms (e.g. gift of the
gap in Singapore instead of the British gift of the gab
(Platt et al., 1984, cited in Jenkins, 2009b).
• Creativity through a combination of English and
indigenous forms (e.g. to put sand in someone’s gari
in Nigeria).
• ELF creativity – we should not wake up any dogs (‘let
sleeping dogs lie’).
Spelling variation
• The process of simplification in English spelling slowed
down after the seventeenth century as a result of the
standardizing influence of printing and the spread of
dictionaries.
• Further influenced by the American lexicographer
Noah Webster, who proposed an ‘American Standard’
in 1789.
– Many differences between British and American spellings.
• However, regulated by authoritative dictionaries, in
most published written texts that are at least published
in ‘standard’ English, there is little variation in spelling
in the Englishes of the world.
Other levels of variation
Grammar-syntactic variation
Pragmatic differences
•
•
• Greetings and address vary
(e.g. in some Asian countries
people may greet you by
asking Have you eaten?)
• Gestures vary (e.g. Indians
signal yes by nodding their
head sideways, which is often
mistaken for a no elsewhere)
• Formality (e.g. Jenkins (2009b)
points out that several ‘New’
Englishes are more formal
than IC varieties)
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
Inflection
Subtractive differences (omit their
verbal ‘-s’ endings)
Additive differences (informations,
staffs etc.)
Tense and aspect (e.g. Did you eat
yet? Have you eaten? I am knowing
very well)
Question formation (You know it
isn’t it?)
Article-omission (He is very good
person)
Concord with collective nouns (The
government is/are …)
The use of auxiliaries (shall and
should)
Irregular verb form (spoiled, spoilt)
Part 3
Pidgins and creoles
What are pidgins and creoles?
• A pidgin is usually defined as a language that emerges in
situations where a simple language is needed to
communicate between two communities.
• A creole usually develops from a pidgin, among a second
generation of speakers of the pidgin for whom the pidgin is
a first and primary language of communication.
– As a result, the pidgin develops more grammar and vocabulary
until the pidgin is developed into a complete working language.
The process of language development from a pidgin to a creole
is called creolization.
• Pidgins and creoles are not broken English. Singh (2000)
states that, ‘a lack of linguistic structure is not a
characteristic of pidgin’ (p. 2) as they develop their own
grammatical rules.
English pidgins and creoles
Emerged due to the spread of
English to diverse corners of the
world where it was used as a
contact language. There are two
main situations:
1. Fort situations where
English was used alongside
other languages in trading
posts (e.g. east African
nations, Singapore).
2. Plantation situations where
English quickly became a
first language due to
displaced slave populations
from linguistically diverse
backgrounds (e.g. Caribbean
nations).
Characteristics of pidgins and creoles
Pidgins and creoles have:
• A superstrate language, which is usually the contact language or
imposed language, such as the English language for the pidgins spoken
along coastal trading routes of west Africa or on plantations in the
Caribbean.
• A substrate language, which is usually the local language, such as the
West African languages spoken along these trading routes and on
plantations.
• Simplification of grammatical features of the superstrate language,
such as verb irregularities (throwed instead of threw) and unnecessary
grammatical features such as the third-person ‘s’ (she say instead of
she says).
• The incorporation of substrate language grammatical features with
superstrate language vocabulary (although this is not always the case).
If the creole develops in a way that it loses those characteristics that
makes it a creole, or moves back towards the superstrate language
through educational or policy, it can be said to undergo decreolization.
Examples of Jamaican creole
• Unno nuh fe heat de green mango dem.
– You all are not to eat the green mangoes.
• Mi nuh wan nutten fe eat.
– I don't want anything to eat.
• Memba mi haffi lef Chewsday.
– Remember I will have to leave on Tuesday.
• Mi was suh mad mi almost drap dung!
– I was so mad I almost fell down!
Source: http://www.jamaicans.com/speakja/patoisarticle/sound.shtml
Attitudes towards creole Englishes
• Until recent decades, education systems of creole communities
sought to decreolize the languages spoken due to a view that they
were ‘incorrect’.
– Because a ‘correct’ English was enforced in schools in many creole
communities, most speakers of creoles in ENL countries today can
speak both an acrolectal form of English (in formal settings) and a
basilectal form of English (for everyday vernacular use). In Jamaica
these forms are viewed as different languages (English and Patios).
• Creoles these days are viewed more and more as languages in their
own right, rather than languages that need to be ‘fixed’. Winford
(2011, p. 419) states:
– ‘Changes in attitudes have been due to several factors: the growing
sense of nationalism in these communities since independence; the
emergence of a substantial body of scholarship that demonstrates the
validity of the creoles as languages in their own right; the growing
tendency to use creole in literary works; and the readiness of the
powers-that-be to allow use of creole in contexts such as education.’
Part 4
Standard language ideology, ownership,
and identity
• Standard language ideology relates to the way
society thinks about language standards in terms
of what is ‘correct’ or ‘acceptable’.
– ‘Language Ideology can be defined, in broad
terms, as the structured and consequential ways
we think about language’ (Seargeant, 2009, p. 26).
Standard language ideology in history
• The belief in the existence of a ‘standard’ English is deeply rooted in
the history of the English language.
• Lecture 1 recap:
– British rulers sought a ‘standard’
– Chancery Standard English instigated as the language of court (1300s)
– Invention of the printing press.
• Spelling standardization was first:
– Samuel Johnson’s (1755) Dictionary of the English Language
– Noah Webster’s (1828) American Dictionary of the English Language.
• Standard language ideology also emerged through accepted usage and
not through printed matter. As Kachru and Smith (2008, p. 3) explain:
– ‘Codification is not a prerequisite for legitimizing a language. For
instance, Australians spoke Australian English for years before a
dictionary of Australian English (The Macquarie Dictionary, 1981) was
compiled and a grammatical description of Australian English (Collins
and Blair, 1989) appeared.’
Ideas of a spoken standard
In the UK: The case of RP
In America: General American
•
•
•
•
•
Wealthy, educated class.
Compulsory schooling in the UK also
allowed contact between people of
different classes and different English
dialects.
The introduction of radio and the BBC
in 1921 caused RP to become even
more prevalent as the ‘standard’
English:
– McIntyre (2009, p. 29) writes: ‘The
prestige associated with it [RP] led to
many people adapting their own
accents (either consciously or
subconsciously) in order to avoid the
stigma that was increasingly
associated with regional
pronunciations.’
•
•
Only spoken by 3% of population but
still often classed as the ‘standard’.
Its prestige has been in decline.
Ideology is less intense.
Does not assign strong positive, or
prestige, value to any particular
dialect of American English.
In other ENL countries
•
RP historically held prestige in former
British colonies but this has been
changing quickly. For example, in
Jamaica, ‘recent years have seen the
“functional dethronement” of
Standard English as the exclusive
language of public-formal domains and
there is a shift toward a local variety as
the new standard’ (Melchers and Shaw,
2011, p. 123).
Standard language ideology in the EC
• Debate on standards has increased with global spread.
• Concept of a ‘standard’ English continues:
– American or UK English desirable  influences hiring practices
(e.g. Middle East, Asia).
– Native speakers as the ‘owners’.
– Non-IC Englishes as ‘illegitimate’.
– Implications for ELT where ‘standards’ of RP and American are
over-represented.
• Mufwene (2001, p. 107) states that the indigenized
Englishes of the OC are treated as the ‘illegitimate’
offspring of English, while NES varieties are regarded as the
‘legitimate’ offspring because of the (mistaken) belief that
they have evolved from Old English without
‘contamination’.
The problem of ‘standard’
language
Language is always changing:
• In terms of vocabulary standardization, even the first
dictionaries recognized that the English language was
always changing, and thus the dictionary would not be
an ever-lasting account of English (see Samuel Johnson’s
English dictionary of 1755).
• Milroy (2007, p. 138) writes, ‘there is usually a tradition
of popular complaint about language, bewailing the low
quality of general usage and claiming that the language is
degenerating’ (quoted in Garrett, 2010).
• Thus, for many years ‘standard’ English was confined to a
written standard of grammar, vocabulary, and spelling.
Conclusions: Why standard
language ideology is a fallacy …
• The idea of a standard implies stability, but language is unstable
(Widdowson, 2003).
• English ‘belongs to everyone who speaks it, but it is nobody’s
mother tongue’ (Rajagopalan, 2004, p. 111).
• To support the notion of ‘standard’ English is incompatible with the
complex reality of how English is used worldwide (Saraceni, 2009).
• ‘Standardisation is never complete because ultimately, a language is
the property of the communities that use it … It is not the exclusive
property of governments, educators or prescriptive grammarians,
and it is arrogant to believe that it is’ (Milroy and Milroy, 1999, p.
45).
• ELF research highlights that NNESs do not speak a ‘standard’ version
of the language and it is increasingly difficult and irrelevant to
define a NS in multilingual societies (Kirkpatrick, 2007).
Summary of Lecture 2
•
•
Language is always changing, and thus a view that English is a monolithic entity
that is impervious to variation is an incorrect assumption.
English language is a living entity which feeds off other languages, speakers,
cultures, and societies:
– In areas/times of extreme contact with speakers of other languages, the English
language has sometimes undergone massive changes.
•
•
•
•
•
English can vary on a number of linguistic levels including: sound, vocabulary,
grammar, syntax, and pragmatics.
Pidgins and creoles were historically viewed as broken English, but there are now
shifts in opinion and modern recognition of them as national independent
languages.
Negative attitudes toward variation and change are not limited to pidgins and
creoles.
Standard language ideology of English has existed for a millennium, and thus is
difficult to sway.
‘New’ Englishes struggle for recognition as legitimate Englishes:
– However, the WE paradigm, with its investigation and codification of Englishes, has
done much to raise awareness of the normalness, and therefore validity, of
variation in the English language.
•
ELF researchers have done much to highlight the fact that ownership of the English
language is no longer with NESs but with speakers across the IC, OC, and EC.
Key terms
Creolization
Extended pidgin
Language ideology
Language standardization
Received Pronunciation (RP)
Jargon
Plantation creoles
Fort creoles
Maroon creole
Decreolization
Superstrate language
Substrate language
Language universals, or universal grammar
Internally driven (endogenous)
Externally driven (exogenous)
Synchronic change
Diachronic change
Attitudes
Borrowing
Codification
World Englishes
‘New’ Englishes
Nativized
Dialects
Accents
Varieties
Registers
Remetaphorization
Stereotypes
Ownership
General American
Global Englishes
Consonant clusters
Mergers
Split
Diphthongs
Interlocutors
Code-mixing
Code-switching
Englishes
Standard
Phonemes
Further reading
On language variation and change:
• Chambers, J. K., Trudgill, P. and Schilling-Estes, N. (2004). The
Handbook of Language Variation and Change. Malden, MA:
Blackwell.
On variation in World Englishes:
• Chapters 4, 5, 6 and 7 of Introducing Global Englishes.
On pidgins and creoles:
• Singh, I. (2000). Pidgins and Creoles. London: Hodder Arnold.
On standard language ideology:
• Milroy, J. and Milroy, L. (2012). Authority in Language: Investigating
Standard English. London: Routledge.