Varieties of English

Alexander Bergs, Laurel Brinton, Alexander Bergs, Laurel Brinton

• Publisher: De Gruyter Mouton
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9783110522792
• eBook ISBN: 9783110523041
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Languages
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

This volume is one of the first detailed expositions of the history of different varieties of English. It explores language variation and varieties of English from an historical perspective, covering theoretical topics such as diffusion and supraregionalization as well as concrete descriptions of the internal and external historical developments of more than a dozen varieties of English.

Laurel J. Brinton and Alexander Bergs

Chapter 1:
Introduction

Laurel J. Brinton: Vancouver (Canada)

Alexander Bergs: Osnabrück (Germany)

1English Language Studies

2Description of the Series

3Description of this Volume

4References

1English Language Studies

The study of the English language has a lengthy history. The second half of the 18th century saw a phenomenal increase in the number of published grammars of the vernacular language, while the field of comparative linguistics arising in the 19th century was concerned in large part with the Germanic languages, including English. Moreover, in the field of theoretical linguistics that English has played a truly central role. While there are no reliable statistics, it seems safe to say that the majority of studies in contemporary linguistics deal at least in part with English, and are also written in English.

During the 20th century, monumental works concerned with the English language, both synchronic and diachronic, were produced, following historical/comparative and more contemporary linguistic approaches. In keeping with developments on the field of general linguistics, today it is possible to find descriptions and analyses of the history and development of English from virtually any linguistic perspective: external, internal, generative, functional, sociolinguistic, pragmatic, comparative, phonological, morphological, syntactic, lexical, semantic. There are numerous “Histories of English” to cater to just about every (theoretical) taste, as well as detailed descriptions of historical periods, language levels, or theoretical frameworks of English and specialized studies of individual topics in the development of the language.

Work on the history of English has culminated most recently in the a series of edited handbooks and histories of English: the six-volume Cambridge History of the English Language, edited by Richard M. Hogg (1992–2001), The Handbook of the History of English, edited by Ans van Kemenade and Bettelou Los (2006), The Oxford History of English, edited by Lynda Mugglestone (2012 [2006]), The Oxford Handbook of the History of English, edited by Elizabeth Closs Traugott and Terttu Nevalainen (2012), the two-volume English Historical Linguistics: An International Handbook, edited by Alexander Bergs and Laurel J. Brinton (2012), and most recently The Cambridge Handbook of English Historical Linguistics, edited by Päiva Pahta and Merja Kytö (2015).

While study of the history of any language begins with texts, increasingly scholars are turning to dictionaries and corpora of English that are available online or electronically. The third edition of the Oxford English Dictionary online, while still undergoing revision, is now fully integrated with the Historical Thesaurus. The Middle English Dictionary, completed in 2001, is freely available online along with the Corpus of Middle English Prose and Verse. The pioneer historical corpus of English, The Helsinki Corpus of English Texts, was first released to scholars in 1991. The Dictionary of Old English Web Corpus, containing all Old English texts, is searchable online. ARCHER, A Representative Corpus of English Registers 1650–1900, accessible at a number of universities, provides a balanced selection of historical texts in electronic form. COHA, a 400-million-word, balanced Corpus of Historical American English 1810–2009, was launched online in 2010. Smaller corpora, such as the Corpus of English Dialogues 1560–1760, the Lampeter Corpus of Early Modern English Tracts, the Corpus of Early English Correspondence, the Corpus of Early English Medical Writing, the Corpus of Late Modern English 3.0, and the newly expanded Old Bailey Corpus, have made more specialized corpora – covering more periods and more text types – available to scholars. Archives of historical newspapers online, including the Zurich English Newspaper Corpus and the Rostock Newspaper Corpus, provide another source of electronic data. Finally, syntactically annotated corpora for historical stages of English are being produced, including The York-Helsinki Parsed Corpus of Old English Poetry, The York-Toronto-Helsinki Parsed Corpus of Old English Prose, The Penn-Helsinki Parsed Corpus of Middle English, and The Penn-Helsinki Parsed Corpus of Early Modern English. (For information on all of the corpora listed here, see http://www.helsinki.fi/varieng/CoRD/corpora/).

2Description of the Series

The two-volume English Historical Linguistics: An International Handbook (Bergs and Brinton 2012) serves as the textual basis for the current five-volume reader series The History of English. The aim of this series is to make selected papers from this important handbook accessible and affordable for a wider audience, and in particular for younger scholars and students, and to allow their use in the classroom. Each chapter is written by a recognized specialist in the topic and includes an extensive bibliography suitable for a range of levels and interests.

While conventional histories of English (e.g., Brinton and Arnovick 2016) are almost universally organized chronologically, the six-volume Cambridge History of English (Hogg 1992–2001) is organized by linguistic level, as is the shortened version (Hogg and Denison 2006) and to a lesser extent The Handbook of the History of English (van Kemanade and Los 2006). Volumes 1 to 4 of this series likewise follow this pattern:

Volume 1: The History of English: Historical Outlines from Sound to Text provides a comprehensive overview of the history of English and explores key questions and debates. The volume begins with a re-evaluation of the concept of periodization in the history of English. This is followed by overviews of changes in the traditional areas of phonology, morphology, syntax, and semantics as well as chapters covering areas less often treated in histories of English, including prosody, idioms and fixed expressions, pragmatics and discourse, onomastics, orthography, style/register/text types, and standardization.

Volume 2: The History of English: Old English provides an in-depth account of Old English. Individual chapters review the state of the art in phonological, morphological, syntactic, and semantic studies of Old English. Key areas of debate, including dialectology, language contact, standardization, and literary language, are also explored. The volume sets the scene with a chapter on pre-Old English and ends with a chapter discussing textual resources available for the study of earlier English.

Volume 3: The History of English: Middle English provides a wide-ranging account of Middle English. Not only are the traditional areas of linguistic study explored in state-of-the-art chapters on Middle English phonology morphology, syntax, and semantics, but the volume also covers less traditional areas of study, including Middle English creolization, sociolinguistics, literary language (including the language of Chaucer), pragmatics and discourse, dialectology, standardization, language contact, and multilingualism.

Volume 4: The History of English: Early Modern English provides a comprehensive account of Early Modern English. In seventeen chapters, this volume not only presents detailed outlines of the traditional language levels, such as phonology, morphology, syntax, semantics and pragmatics, but it also explores key questions and debates, such as do-periphrasis, the Great Vowel Shift, pronouns and relativization, literary language (including the language of Shakespeare), and sociolinguistics, including contact and standardization.

The last volume in the series turns its attention to the spread of English worldwide. Volume 5: The History of English: Varieties of English is one of the first detailed expositions of the history of different varieties of English. It explores language variation and varieties of English from an historical perspective, covering theoretical topics such as diffusion and supra-regionalization as well as concrete descriptions of the internal and external historical developments of more than a dozen varieties of English including American English, African American Vernacular English, Received Pronunciation, Estuary English, and English in Canada, Africa, India, Wales, among many others.

Taking into account the important developments in the study of English effected by the availability of electronic corpora, this series of readers on The History of English offers a comprehensive, interdisciplinary, and theory-neutral synopsis of the field. It is meant to facilitate both research and teaching by offering up-to-date overviews of all the relevant aspects of the historical linguistics of English and by referring scholars, teachers, and students to more in-depth coverage. To that end, many articles have been updated from the 2012 edition to include more recent publications.

3Description of this volume

Unlike the other four volumes in this series, this volume does not deal with the standard history of “English English”, but rather takes a wider perspective in that it provides detailed descriptions of the histories of different major varieties of English (such as American English, Canadian English or Received Pronunciation) and of English-speaking regions (such as English in India or Africa). Moreover, it also includes some more theoretical chapters, for example on the origins of African American Language, on diffusion and on supraregionalization.

The first four chapters of this volume deal with the development of English (and its varieties) in North America.

Richard Bailey traces the history of “Standard American English”. It becomes clear in his chapter that American English has a particularly dynamic history. After its emergence in the 16th century, it was recognized as such only about 200 years later. And while early observers noted a particular ‘purity’ of this variety, and a certain lack of dialect variation, British speakers also feared that this new variety might influence their own speech in the long run. From the 19th century onwards, however, American speakers began to worry about ‘their language’ as ever growing waves of immigrants brought new languages to the country. And to this day, there is still the open question whether there is something like a standard for American English. Luanne von Schneidemesser also discusses American English in her chapter, but she focuses on “Regional Varieties of American English”. She provides a detailed outline of the various projects that led to the description of those varieties, including the Linguistic Atlas of New England, the Dictionary of American Regional English and the most recent Atlas of North American English. She concludes with a plea that studies in regional dialectology and in social and ethnic dialects need to work more closely together in the future in order to arrive at a fuller picture of linguistic variation in North America. Stefan Dollinger begins his chapter on “Canadian English” with a general overview of Canada’s settlement history. In his section on methodology, he emphasizes that the general lack of historical treatments of Canadian English seems to necessitate a complex combination of real-time and apparent-time perspectives. The reader is then introduced to major variables that characterize the history of Canadian English at all levels of linguistic structure. Sonja Lanehardt focuses in her contribution on “Re-viewing the origins and history of African American Language”. After presenting some general views regarding the nature of African American language, such as the deficit position or structuralist perspectives, she gives a detailed description of the traditional big players in the debate, i.e. Anglicists versus Creolists. In a following section, Lanehardt moves beyond this and discusses four more recent positions. In conclusion, she points out that all these perspectives should be evaluated not just on the basis of their linguistic substance, but also with regard to the ideological and epistemic perspectives of the scholars involved.

The following five chapters deal with English in Britain, and varieties of British English in the widest sense. Pam Peters focuses on the history of Standard British English, beginning with notion of British English as a national standard language in the 16th century. She then traces this notion through the colonial period until the present day, where British English as a former international standard is challenged by American English and World English(es). The question remains open, however, what kind of role a regional, and yet pluralistic notion of British English will play in the future of a “world standard English”. In their chapter on “Regional varieties of British English” Bernd Kortmann and Christian Langstrof provide detailed descriptions of the phonetic and phonological as well as morphosyntactic variation in major varieties of British English. They show that variation on the consonantal level, though rich in form, is mainly guided by socio-economic factors and style, rather than region (in contrast to what we see in the vowel system). Moreover, their section on morphosyntax clearly shows that we need to distinguish between pan-British features and regional markers.

The following chapters deal with individual varieties of English English, which have received considerable attention by the media and thus warrant separate treatments. The chapter on “Received Pronunciation” (RP) by Lynda Mugglestone explores the history and development of the notion of RP as a more recent, non-localized British accent. On the basis of new and hitherto unexamined archive data, Mugglestone trace...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Table of Contents
• Abbreviations
• Chapter 1: Introduction
• Chapter 2: Standard American English
• Chapter 3: Regional varieties of American English
• Chapter 4: Canadian English in real-time perspective
• Chapter 5: Re-viewing the origins and history of African American Language
• Chapter 6: Standard British English
• Chapter 7: Regional varieties of British English
• Chapter 8: Received Pronunciation
• Chapter 9: Estuary English
• Chapter 10: Cockney
• Chapter 11: Celtic and Celtic Englishes
• Chapter 12: Scots
• Chapter 13: English in Ireland
• Chapter 14: English in Wales
• Chapter 15: Australian/New Zealand English
• Chapter 16: English in India
• Chapter 17: English in Africa – a diachronic typology
• Chapter 18: Diffusion
• Chapter 19: Supraregionalization
• Chapter 20: Pidgins and creoles
• Index