Outer circle

What he has eaten? Lexis: In discussion of Indian costume there will be many

foreignisms (military hotel/Brahmin hotel ‘nonvegetarian/vegetarian hotel’; finger-ring

as opposed to nose-ring). Local words which lexicalise general concepts not lexicalised

in other varieties include borrowed forms like CRORE ‘10 million’ and lakh/lac

‘100,000’; new formations include codaughter -in-law, co-brother ‘husband’s brother’s

wife’. Most tautonyms are English words adapted with a different meaning. South

Asian English includes: bogey ‘railway carriage’, cracker ‘firework’, fire ‘be angry with’.

Some heteronyms are borrowings from local languages: goonda ‘hooligan’, dacoit

‘bandit’. There is also a heteronymic compounding element, the borrowed form wallah

which forms nouns meaning ‘person associated with’.

Africa and South-East Asia

Four countries in East and Central Africa have some connections with English:

Rwanda, where English is currently replacing French as the language of government

and education. The process is driven by a desire to orient the country towards the

English speaking East African Community

Somalia, where the Somali language coexists with English and Italian

Ethiopia, where secondary and higher education are mainly in English, but most other

state functions are in Amharic or a regional language.

Southern Sudan, where English is well established, and may shortly be the official

language of an independent South Sudan.

Most sub-Saharan African states are extremely multilingual. In each state there are

typically two or three major languages, a dozen or so minor ones, and many spoken

only by a few thousand people. The indigenous languages in sub-Saharan Africa

mostly belong to three groups:

Afro-Asiatic, the group which includes Arabic, such as Hausa in Northern Nigeria and

adjoining areas;

Cushitic/Sudanic and Nilotic in Ethiopia, Somalia and northern Kenya and Uganda;

Niger-Congo (The largest group).

The Niger-Congo languages in general are often tone languages in which tone is used

to distinguish word forms such as tenses or lexical items in general: for example àwò

(two low tones) ‘star’ versus áwó (two high tones) ‘guinea fowl’. Another characteristic

feature is restrictions on consonant clusters and final consonants, (English street

appears as a loan into Yoruba as títì).

By around 1000 ad there were two kinds of African states south of the Sahara: Islamic

ones in contact with the Arabic-speaking, and pagan ones. Swahili is a Bantu language

with extensive borrowing of vocabulary from Arabic and Persian. On the west coast, by

the beginning of the nineteenth century English had become a useful foreign

language. Written Nigerian English dates from as early as 1786 and it is likely that

some form of pidgin existed. The slave trade was abolished in the British Empire in

1807. There was also some resettlement of freed slaves. Ex-slaves from Britain, North

America and the Caribbean settled at Freetown in Sierra Leone.They spoke various

kinds of creole English. From the 1820s freed slaves from the USA settled in Liberia

and created a community speaking a variety of American English.

On the east coast, the first half of the nineteenth century saw a large increase in the

slave trade and the states in the interior were destabilised. During this period,

missionaries with various European languages as L1 started to spread Christianity,

English and Swahili inland from the coast. At the beginning of the nineteenth century,

a Bantu clan in Southern Africa called the Zulus united a large number of Bantu

speakers into one state. Late in the nineteenth century, rivalry among European

powers led to a ‘scramble for Africa’ and the Congress of Berlin in 1884–5 ratified the

division of the continent into zones belonging to seven European powers. In West

Africa the new rulers appointed local clerks and policemen who spoke English, creole

or pidgin. British policy towards the Africans was not openly assimilationist, but in

British-controlled territories English was generally now the language of administration

and the higher courts.

During the colonial period schooling was limited, but what there was took place both in

English and in local languages.

English in Africa today: In all the ex-British colonies throughout Africa, English remains

the main language of education. There are at least three groups in Africa that have

always had English as their mother tongue: the black settlers in Liberia; those in Sierra

Leone; the white settlers in South Africa (they have now shifted to English and have a

distinctive variety).

There are also indigenous groups who are going over to English or pidgin. In

multilingual areas of West Africa with no local lingua franca, communities seem to be

shifting to pidgin. The languages used in the African countries where English is the

main European language used can be placed in a hierarchy: at the top comes English

and at the bottom unwritten languages like Emai, with no function in school. The

Englishes of West Africa have formal similarities and the sociolinguistic situations in

the various countries are somewhat similar. The main site for learning English is the

school and teachers typically move about a good deal. The varieties of English in the

other countries in eastern and southern Africa have many features of form in common

because of the common Bantu substratum.

In Zambia and Zimbabwe English is very dominant and local languages have little or

no public role. In Kenya, Uganda and Tanzania, Swahili has a strong position. In South

Africa the government has launched an extremely ambitious languagerights policy,

but English remains in wide use. Since the 1950s, Africa has produced a large

literature in English, honoured in the 1986 Nobel Prize for Wole Soyinka and in the

international success of novels by Chinua Achebe and others. The media in

anglophone Africa use a mixture of English and local languages. South Africa is as

multilingual as most African countries, but it has made unique efforts to validate local

languages and have them all used in all domains, including administration and

education. This is an attempt to overcome the history of linguistic oppression.

African Englishes:

some common features, partly because they often have a substratum in Bantu

languages;

a smaller vowel set than inner-circle varieties, compensated for by spelling

pronunciations and nonreduction of vowels. Spelling pronunciations are normal and

predominant;

some vowel pronunciations used as identity markers;

word stress sometimes assigned according to local rules;

figurative expressions based on the substrate languages;

in casual speech, long words which sound formal to inner-circle ears but do not

necessarily have that value.

Phonology: The accents of individual African speakers depend on their mother tongue,

the area they grew up in, and how acrolectally they are speaking. In West Africa,

pronunciation depends on an interaction of spelling and region/mother tongue. People

who pronounce first, bird, third as /fɔst, bɔd, tɔd/ are from southern Nigeria: people

who pronounce bird, murder, world as /bad, mada, wald/ are Hausa speakers from

northern Nigeria; people who pronounce work as /wεk/ are from Ghana. African English

is less stress-timed than inner-circle varieties. As for consonants, many varieties of

African English realise /θð/ as [td] as one would expect. Final voiced fricatives (which

are somewhat unusual in the world’s languages) may be unvoiced: [laf] love. Final /l/ is

often vocalised. Most African English is syllable timed with stress marked mainly by

high pitch. Words are very often stressed differently in African English (partly because

stress is a less prominent feature and rarely distinctive). The syntax of written

standard African English is close to that of other Standard varieties. Three local

features of syntax:

because it will be partisan affair, where one might expect a partisan affair, reflects a

local, or unsystematic, use of articles;

a nonpartisan flavour would be expected and so organized that it would give contain a

characteristic outer-circle use of would as a tentative or polite version of will rather

than something required by the sequence of tenses;

in seized upon by detractors to distract the verb distract is intransitive, where inner-

circle varieties might use an object such as attention.

Might appear in more mesolectal varieties more local characteristic, most of them

typical of New English: for example, nonstandard patterns of verb concord, avoidance

of complex tenses, extension of progressive forms to stative verbs.

African Indian English: consistent plural marking in the second-person pronouns you

singular and y’all plural; inversion in indirect questions (I don’t know when’s the plane

going to land); and extended use of of in constructions like She put too much of nuts in

the cake. Afrikaans English differs in syntax from ‘Anglo’ South African English mainly

in features like concord and article use that affect all second-language speakers.

Lexicon: The situation for African speakers varies from country to country. In Ghana,

Nigeria or Zambia, English is genuinely a link language, and any borrowed word must

be genuinely ‘local English’ rather than code mixing; in Kenya and Tanzania speakers

can assume that the interlocutor knows Swahili. Borrowed foreignisms are common,

like people who khonta-ed (‘apply for land from royal family’) from Siswati in

Swaziland, or bredie ‘type of stew’ (from Afrikaans), or maas ‘dairy product’ (from a

Nguni language). In Nigeria foreignisms are also borrowings from local languages

(dodo ‘fried plantains/bananas’ or foofoo ‘yam porridge’). There are local

lexicalisations too borrowings like will be bulewa ed (‘promoted, impliedly to an

unrefusable but difficult post’) from Swaziland. Tautonyms: words which have a

different or extended meaning in one variety compared to another. Nigerian English

has escort ‘show/accompany someone out of the house’, travel ‘be away’. Kinship

terms have extended reference in many African cultures and languages: brother

‘member of same tribe/friend’ in Nigeria. Heteronyms: items or activities which have

different names in different varieties. There are borrowings from local languages and

pidgin ( chop ‘food’ from pidgin, lobola ‘bride-price’ from Siswati in Swaziland).

Tautonyms and heteronyms combine in the many French-influenced usages in

Cameroon lexis (formation for ‘training’, licence ‘university degree’).

Pragmatics: Discourse patterns are transferred direct from one’s own culture and

therefore will be very different across Africa. One common stylistic feature of African

English is the use of id