The spread of english

Variation in World Englishes can be found at all levels of language: spelling,

phonetics and phonology, morphology, syntax, vocabulary and discourse.

Formal spelling

Most formal written texts are produced in standard varieties, where spelling is

regulated by authoritative dictionaries. Although varieties of (World) Standard English

are generally characterized by great similarity at this level of language, there are

some well-known exceptions, such as the British-American diversity, mostly rule-

governed as in travelled versus traveled, centre versus center, colour versus color, but

also lexical distributional, as in grey vs gray, tyre vs tire. Most of the American spelling

conventions were created by Webster, who in 1789 proposed an “American Standard”.

In some transported Englishes, especially Canadian English, which is generally

characterized by conflicting loyalties, that is to Britain versus the USA, there is great

changeability in spelling and usage varies for regional, social, and political reasons.

Phonetics/phonology

If an accent of English is characterized by very special phonetic realizations, this will

usually be described in words rather than by adding a number of additional symbols.

As is customary, / / is used to indicate phonemic transcriptions, whereas [ ] is used for

allophonic transcriptions (cf. the description of the /ɑ:/ phoneme) and occasionally also

for impressionistic notation without relying on phonological analysis. Any symbols

(letters) enclosed in <> refer to spelling, not pronunciation.

glottal: a sound produced in the larynx, due to the closure or narrowing of the glottis,

as in the initial consonant [h] of happy and in the glottal stop, which is stereotypically

connected with London Cockney but actually found in various accents around the

English-speaking world.

retroflex: a position slightly further back than alveolar, with the tip of the tongue bent

or ‘curled’ backwards, as generally in r’s produced by Americans and speakers from

England’s West Country (the south-west).

tapped: refers to consonants that are related to trills; the difference is that the

movement is temporary: there is only one beat (tap), which is usually produced by the

tip of the tongue. A tapped /r/ which is represented as [ɾ] and sounds almost like a [d]

is common in some accents of British English, especially between vowels, as in very,

hurry. This sound is also characteristic of most varieties of American English, but then

as a realization of intervocalic /t/, as in city, latter.

trilled (rolled): refers to certain types of /r/ and stands for the rapid, repeated tapping

of one speech organ against another. It is something of a stereotype that front trills –

in which the tip of the tongue is used – are characteristic of Scottish English.

uvular: the back of the tongue against the uvula. Unlike many European languages,

English does not generally have uvular, ‘back’ /r/, but there is a recessive pocket in

north-east England, where it can still be heard under the name of the ‘Northumbrian

Burr’, and some Scottish speakers use it variably.

wide: a term used about diphthongs that are characterized by a relatively long

distance from the starting-point to the finishing-point.

In comparing accents of English around the globe, we should consider the phonemic

inventory, that is the set-up of distinctive units, as well as the phonetic output, that is

the various allophones. The average listener will find the most striking differences in

the actual output; variation in vowel quality, in particular, is huge. Two accents, such

as RP and General Australian English, may have exactly the same number of

distinctive units (phonemes), and yet sound very different indeed. Both accents, for

example, have an /ɑ:/ phoneme, as in palm, father, which is realized as [ɑ:] in RP but

as a front [a:] by most Australian speakers. To take another example: the minimal pair

bed/bad will apply to all native-speaker varieties of English, but the actual contrastive

sounds vary drastically in quality: in New Zealand English they approximate to bid/bed

as pronounced by an RP speaker.

There are, however, also important differences among World Englishes with regard to

the phonemic inventory. Comparing RP and the somewhat constructed ‘average’

accent General American, which may be referred to as the two reference accents, we

find that the vowel systems differ quite considerably. The most striking difference is

that American English has fewer diphthongs, generally lacking centring ones and

having a monophthong in words such as goat. Scottish English has even fewer

diphthongs and African as well as Caribbean English varieties tend to have restricted

vowel systems with many mergers.

Variations

Grammar

More importantly, morphological and syntactic variation – at least among standard

varieties of English – is not as striking as phonological variation, nor has it been as

thoroughly studied and described.

As the following section in this lesson will specify, and the study on ‘inner-circle’

varieties in the following lessons will validate, this is true as far as the lexicon is

concerned. Furthermore, English is undergoing some specific changes which may be

attributed to the influence of American English: the use of hopefully as a sentence

adverbial (Hopefully, you will find this lesson useful), the use of do-support in

constructions such as Do you have any money?, and the increasing use of ‘bare’

infinitival complements after help, as in My mum used to help cook the meals for the

children instead of help to cook. On the other hand, Trudgill thinks that there is also

some indication that grammatical innovations may be spreading from Britain to the

USA, for example the use of do in sentences such as I don’t know if I’m going to the

party tonight, but I might do.

There exists yet no comprehensive typology of grammatical variation in World

Englishes. Nevertheless, attempts have been made at describing worldwide variation

in certain salient features such as tag questions, which may be variant as in You didn’t

see him, did you? or invariant as in You didn’t see him, is it? Other syntactic and

morphological features, which are variable and would lend themselves particularly well

to typological descriptions, are:

Concord with collective nouns (for example, the government-audience is-are: the

plural is used much less frequently in American English than in English. Australian

English has a pattern of its own and so on).

Tense and aspect (the past and perfect tenses, for example, tend to be used

differently, as in American English Did you call her yet? corresponding to English Have

you called her yet?; in a number of varieties around the world, the progressive form is

used with stative verbs, as in Irish English This is belonging to me. The use of

auxiliaries (variation in the use of shall and should with first-person subjects, the

development of new auxiliaries such as gotta in certain varieties.

Pronominal usage (there are, for example, two distinct second-person pronouns in

some varieties of English

Irregular verb forms (for example, the well-known ‘American’ past tenses dove

(instead of dived) and snuck (instead of sneaked); in nonstandard varieties, variation

is particularly striking.

Lexis

Processes of lexical differentiation

All varieties of English share the overwhelming majority of their abstract and

generalized vocabulary, because it derives from a common body of knowledge and a

common set of texts. We will use the term General English for words that are nonlocal

in this way. However, the names of some everyday things vary across varieties of

English. What the Americans call a closet the British call a built-in wardrobe, and what

the British and Americans call a cupboard or wardrobe, the Indians call an almirah.

This variation is usually accommodated in the notion of Standard English – that is

Standard English has US, British, Indian and so on variants with some different lexis.

One source of different lexis in present-day varieties is separate inheritance. Two

variants may have existed in the norm at the time when the varieties separated and

the two varieties may have happened to adopt different items as the unmarked word.

This is said to be the origin of the contrast between British autumn and US fall, for

example. Similarly, both railroad and railway, sidewalk and pavement were in use in

Britain in the nineteenth century, and railroad and sidewalk have happened to become

the norm in the USA. as against railway and pavement in Britain. The second source of

difference in lexis is word-formation (coining) in one or both varieties. There are

many different word-formation processes. Perhaps the most common is the simple

application of an old word to a new concept. Thus, North Americans use the word robin

to refer to a different bird from the one called robin in Britain, and a hawker in

Singapore and Malaysia is someone who keeps a stall in the market, while a British

hawker goes from door to door selling his wares. A particular variant of this is

conversion: shift of word class with retention of meaning, as in West African to off – ‘to

switch off’. A new word can be formed by compounding or giving a specialized

meaning to a combination of English words. In the USA, the compound washcloth

corresponds to the British form face flannel, or just flannel. West Africans have

produced the combination chewing stick for the stick with a chewed end that is used

for toothcleaning.

Another intralingual process is derivation, where a new word is created by adding

affixes to an old one. When cars acquired noise-reduction devices, the suffix “er” was

used in Britain to create silencer and in the US to create muffler. In West Africa a chief

sits on a stool just as a king sits on a throne, so the words destool and enstoolment

have been derived by analogy with dethrone, enthronement. In Australian English, the

suffixes “ie” and “o” are particularly productive (roughie for ‘outsider in a horse race’,

arvo, ‘afternoon’, smoko, ‘a break for smoking’). The third main source of lexical

difference is borrowing. Borrowing has been a common way of dealing with new

phenomena in newly settled areas and of referring to local institutions where English is

a second language. There are various degrees of borrowing: British courgette from

French and US zucchini from Italian retain more of their source language form.

Borrowed forms are often combined with native ones to make hybrids, like Indian

English generator-wallah, ‘man who supplies generators’. The elements of source

language compounds or idioms can be translated literally to produce a loan translation

or calque, like West African long legs ‘influence in high places’.

Variety difference often results from a combination of these processes: US English has

coined the compound eggp