THE PECULIARITY OF ENGLISH GLOBAL DIVERSITY

Тетяна Мітроусова

(Кам’янець-Подільський національний університет імені Івана Огієнка)

THE PECULIARITY OF ENGLISH GLOBAL DIVERSITY

The traditional distinction between language and variety is increasingly difficult to find nowadays in multilingual world. The scholars Kortmann and Lunkenheimer [4] inform about seventy-six varieties of English, though the number is open to debate as the precise number of languages in the world. As Mair reminds, different varieties of English tend to be construent in terms of territorial boundaries, often representing political borders. Such territories may have more than one variety or one variety may be used across several territories [3, p. 254].

Due to De Swaan’s [2] World Language System, English – as the hyper-central language – is relevant for everybody these days, wherever they live. If to extend De Swaan’s model – American, rather than British English is here considered the most important variety of English. Post-colonial Englishes such as Nigerian and Indian English are listed among the super-central varieties, since they are relevant for very large numbers of speakers, along with Irish English, New Zealand English, Jamaican English, Ghanaian English, etc.

Borrowings from American English can be easily detected in British, Australian, Indian, Irish, and Ghanaian English, though the opposite direction of lexical transfer is less likely to occur. The same holds for norms of pronunciation, orthographical conventions, and perhaps even grammatical features, although influence in the latter domain can primarily be expected to manifest itself in terms of distributional shifts. Similarly, British English serves as a model for Irish English, Indian English, exerts influence on Sri Lankan English, and Australian English on New Zealand English and the variety of English spoken on Papua New Guinea. Mair [3] further proposes to extend the De Swaan’s model so as to include non-standard varieties of English: African American Vernacular English and Jamaican Creole count as super-central non-standard varieties, since they exert substantial influence on several standard and nonstandard varieties through popular culture. Mair points out that since speakers from different varieties frequently meet due to easy and fast global transport, so the question where the language ends and another begins becomes increasingly difficult to answer.

What linguists working in variation studies call “variable” and “value” (or “variant”), translates into “categories” and their means of encoding in typology. Across varieties of English, for example, the variable –ing may assume either the values /ɪn/ or /ɪŋ/, the third person singular agreement suffix – another variable – either –s or zero as values, and the variable relative marker may take up the values what, that, at, as, or zero, amongst others. The values are subject to well known conditioning factors such as region, age, ethnic background, sex, level of formality, i.e. topographic and social dimensions, as well as those relating to the situational and linguistic context.

The researchers in the field claim that the logically conceivable space of language variation is heavily constrained. This space keeps focal areas of cognitive domains and means of their encoding that can be consistently encountered in languages of different provenance. Typological research has uncovered several grammatical subsystems that are sensitive to the hierarchy, including person and number marking, word order and case marking [1]. As far as varieties of English are concerned, it is primarily pronominal gender and case marking that can be related to it. Grammatical phenomena in standard and non-standard varieties select different values on these hierarchies and can thus be systematically related to one another. This is not to say, however, that all variation manifested by World Englishes can be modelled in this way. Non-standard features sometimes exhibit greater harmony with cross-linguistic generalizations than the corresponding standard features. If these represent the preferred typological states, they arguably do not spread into the standard varieties due to the World System of Englishes.

Today’s diversity of varieties of English is the product of historical migration and many similarities and differences between them can be explained in such terms: similarities between traditional Newfoundland English / Irish English as well as the dialects of Southwest England, the presence of African American Vernacular English in Nova Scotia, Sierra Leone and Liberia. Due to globalization and extensive social media use, some countries are currently witnessing a shift in the status of English from a foreign to a second language. This shift is practically complete in Scandinavian countries and the Netherlands, but ongoing in Germany and other European countries.

World Englishes have been approached from a multitude of perspectives. More recent approaches focus on the nativization, appropriation and diversification of English in new areas as well as matters of contact-induced change due to interaction with local languages and its use by multilingual speakers.

REFERENCES

  1. Croft William. Typology and Universals. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 2004. 337
  2. De Swaan Abram. The World Language System. A Political Sociology and Political Economy of Language. Cambridge: Polity. 2001. 350 p.
  3. Mair Christian. The World System of Englishes. Accounting for the transnational importance of mobile and mediated vernaculars. English World-Wide 34 (3). 2013. 253-278.
  4. The Electronic World Atlas of Varieties of English / eds. Kortmann B., Lunkenheimer K. Leipzig: Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology. 2013. URL: http://ewaveatlas.org. (last accessed: 10.03.2023).