World Englishes

Gunnel Melchers, Philip Shaw, Peter Sundkvist

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781351042567
• Edition: 3
• Topic: Lingue e linguistica
• Subtopic: Linguistica

The third edition of World Englishes provides an engaging overview of the global variations in vocabulary, grammar, phonology and pragmatics of English as it is used worldwide. This book introduces the principles of linguistic variation and provides coverage on the roots of English, the spread of English, variations of English as a second language and trends for the future.

Thoroughly updated throughout in line with recent research, this third edition now also includes:

• 43 audio examples of speakers of native (17) and of non-native (26) English reflecting the global variety of the language, available to download from www.routledge.com/9781138487659;
• descriptions of selected twenty-first century developing varieties including Chinese English, Russian English and Vietnamese English;
• greater linguistic detail on second-language English in many areas;
• improved and updated descriptions of first-language varieties;
• a new framework for describing lexical variation;
• full discussion throughout of English in social media.

Offering a thorough and detailed descriptive account of all the main varieties of English across the globe, World Englishes provides a balanced discussion of political issues and the sociolinguistic background to variation in English spoken and written, face-to-face, on paper and online, in the twenty-first century. This book is essential reading for students approaching this topic for the first time.

Chapter 1

The roots of English

Focus questions

• What is the origin of the English language?
• What language(s) is it most closely related to?

The legendary printer, editor and translator William Caxton, who introduced printing in England in 1476 and influenced the emergence of a standard language, said this about the state of the language:

And certaynly our langage now vsed varyeth ferre from that whiche was vsed and spoken whan I was borne. … Certaynly it is harde to playse euery man by cause of dyuersite & chaunge of langage.

(Preface to Eneydos [1490])

This could just as well have been voiced by a contemporary observer of the language. The present-day observer might, for example, react to the sentence Everyone in the street was shocked when they heard the news, having learnt that everyone should be followed by he/she, or be utterly confused by the different vowel qualities in accents of English: the word pen, as pronounced by a New Zealander, is easily perceived as pin by British speakers.

For a deeper understanding of today’s English with its infinite variation, it is, in fact, worthwhile travelling even further back in history than Caxton’s time. In this chapter, we would like to outline the early history of the English language in England; that is, from its first appearance up to the emergence of a standard language. The standard history was established by the great historian Bede, writing in Latin about ad 700. The native people of the British Isles were largely Celtic, but in the southern parts of Great Britain, they were under Roman rule from around ad 43 to around the year ad 410, so we can suppose that many spoke Latin as well as a Celtic language. About ad 450, Bede says, groups of Germanic settlers began coming into the country, driving the indigenous population into ‘corners’ such as Wales and Cornwall. The invaders, who probably came from Northern Germany and Denmark, represented three main tribes of people known as Angles, Saxons and Jutes. The Angles, from whose name the word English is derived, settled in the North, the Saxons in the South – their name living on in today’s Sussex, Essex and Middlesex – and, according to Bede, the Jutes in a small area in the South-east, including Kent and the Isle of Wight. These settlers were later referred to as Anglo-Saxons, and their language, although not documented substantially until about 300 years later, constitutes the roots of English. In fact, there may have been Germanic-speaking people in southern England earlier than ad 450, even in Roman times, and it is likely that the Celtic speakers intermarried and merged with the Anglo-Saxons, rather than being driven out as a body of people.

The distinct groups of settlers must have produced a dialectally varied language. Some of these early ‘tribal’ differences can even be traced in rural dialects today; for example, /f/ and /s/ at the beginning of words or syllables in the standard language correspond to /v/ and /z/ in the south-west of England (cf. Section 4.1.5.1). ‘Cider from Somerset’ may, for example, be presented as Zider vrom Zummerzet in local advertising. A few of the words featuring this dialectal characteristic have been adopted in the standard language, such as vixen, ‘female fox’, and vat (‘large container for liquids’) (related to German Fass, Swedish fat).

One of the most important reasons for linguistic variation and change is the degree of contact with speakers of other languages or dialects. Contacts with the indigenous Celtic population did not, however, result in many borrowings of words into English, even though the native people would have had a more adequate, traditional vocabulary at their disposal to describe and categorize the world around them. Such evidence as there is survives chiefly in place names: river names such as Thames, Avon and Wye, and place-name elements such as crag, ‘steep and rugged rock’, and cumb, ‘deep valley’ (cf. Ilfracombe). Admittedly, there are also Celtic borrowings of another type in English now, such as whisky, ‘the water of life’, and galore, ‘lots of’, but these are of a much later date. It should also be added that in some parts of Britain which are, or have been, Celtic strongholds (parts of Scotland, Cornwall), regional dialects of English have fair-sized elements of Celtic in them. A more thorough account, not restricted to vocabulary, of the impact of this substratum, that is, ‘underlying language’, will follow in Sections 4.2–4. However, recent ongoing research suggests that the Celtic influence on English – on all levels of language – has been much more substantial than hitherto believed (Filppula 2008). Aspects of English, it is argued, can be explained by calling it ‘Germanic in the mouths of Celtic speakers’.

In contrast to the limited evidence of Celtic influence on the vocabulary of English, the influence of Latin is certainly pervasive. To begin with, this influence may be explained by the fact that Latin was not the language of conquered people, but of a higher civilization, from which the Anglo-Saxons had a great deal to learn. Some of the early Latin loanwords may actually have been adopted even before the Anglo-Saxons left the Continent. Examples of such early loans are cheese, pepper, street, pound, wall and camp.

With the introduction of Christianity in ad 597, the Latin influence made itself noticeable in many spheres of life. First, all the words pertaining to the Church were introduced: altar, angel, candle; also, a certain number of words connected with learning and education which reflects another aspect of the Church’s influence: school, master, grammatical. Second, many words connected with everyday life, such as names of articles of clothing and household utensils, were introduced: sock, chest, sack, cap, as well as words denoting foods: beet, pear, radish. Third, new names for trees, plants and herbs often replaced the Anglo-Saxon words: pine, lily, fennel. The influence of Latin again made itself felt during the Renaissance (around 1500–1650 in Britain), affecting scientific and scholarly writing in particular, and it has remained strong to this day. Obviously, since Classical Latin is no longer a living language, its present-day impact could hardly be viewed as ‘borrowing’; rather, the Latin element has been integrated into the English system. This integration includes affixes productive in word-formation, such as re-, in-, inter-, -fy (reshuffle, incapacitate, interdisciplinary, rectify).

Towards the end of the eighth century, speakers of English, especially in the north-eastern parts of the British Isles, began to come into contact with speakers of yet another language variety, namely the Viking invaders from Denmark and Norway. Violence and barbarity characterized many of the invaders and their encounters with the English population, but there was, of course, also a great deal of peaceful contact and mutual benefit, and many individuals became permanent settlers. Language contact was relatively easy because Anglo-Saxon and Old Norse were fairly closely related; both were Germanic languages and shared a common stock of vocabulary. There were, however, marked differences in the grammatical systems. According to some recent theories, Englishmen and Scandinavians can be assumed to have got around certain communication problems by simplifying the language, for example, by dropping quite a few inflectional endings. This is, actually, one of the factors that have been brought forward to explain how English developed into the ‘ending-less’ language it is today. The modern Scandinavian standard languages and English share some quite unusual features like ‘preposition-stranding’ (That’s the door she went through), and this may be the result of mutual influence in this period.

Although not as massive as that of Latin or French, the Scandinavian influence has been substantial and has, characteristically, affected many everyday words which are close to the core of the language. The very pronunciation of the k’s and g’s in the following words, where Old English equivalents would have had fricatives, is a sign of Scandinavian origin: sky, bask, whisk, skirt, kid, give, egg. Certain common place-name elements are Scandinavian, such as -by, -thorpe and -toft for ‘a piece of ground’ (cf. Grimsby, Scunthorpe, Lowestoft). Old Norse has even influenced English pronominal usage, which is quite sensational in terms of patterns of borrowing: the pronouns they, their, them are Scandinavian loans, having replaced Anglo-Saxon forms that had grown too similar to other pronouns to keep them distinct.

In certain dialects spoken in typical ‘Viking areas’, that is, basically what was known as the Danelaw, the influence has been particularly marked; in Yorkshire, for example, the following Scandinavian-based words of an everyday character are widely known: lake ‘play’, neaf ‘fist’, lathe ‘barn’, teem ‘empty’. Owing to the close relationship between the languages in contact, it can, however, sometimes be quite difficult to determine which words are truly Scandinavian. A case in point is bairn ‘child’, which is often brought up as an example of a Scandinavian word; yet similar-sounding forms are – or were – found in most Germanic languages. Since the use of bairn tends to be restricted to the northern parts of Britain, it is not unlikely that it has been reinforced by the close contacts with Scandinavia.

In Shetland and Orkney, which were under Scandinavian rule up to 1469, well over 95 per cent of the place names and a substantial part of the vocabulary in the traditional dialects is Scandinavian. A few telling examples of Shetland vocabulary are: ouskeri is a ‘tool for baling out water’ (cf. Swedish öskar), plagg for ‘garment’ (cf. Swedish plagg), scarf for ‘cormorant’ (a bird, cf. Swedish skarv), du as a less formal word of address than you.

In 1066, the Norman Conquest occurred and had a great effect on English, meaning that the language was obscured and perhaps at risk of replacement in the two centuries following this event. During this period, the use of English was socially restricted; it was not used at court, in church or in government administration. Such restr...