Riassunto personale derivato dallo studio integrato del libro consigliato "English, but not quite"

English, but not quite: introduction

The collection of essays is useful to analyse the English varieties at the beginning of the twenty-first century and their effects of the contact with indigenous languages, in particular as a consequence of British colonisation.

A first debate is on a naming problem: Englishes, World Englishes, New Englishes, Postcolonial English, Varieties of English, English as a Global language.

During the 1980s, a shift took place in English studies from Standard English to varieties of English around the world.

However, it has been crucial for the expansion of English also the exportation of the British education system, the literature, and culture by the settlers and/or invaders.

Another important shift was in the fact that, nowadays, it seems that the spreading of English is due to the role of the United States of America as a world power, with American English taking over in the fields of technology, science, medicine, cinema, music, etc.

English is very often used as a lingua franca and this created certain hybrid forms of English which didn't reach the level of pidgin: Spanglish (Spanish+English), Hindish (Hindi+English), Denglish (Deutsche+English), Italiese or Franglais.

In multicultural cities of Great Britain, especially London, due to a vast migration especially from British ex-colonies towards the old mother country, the varieties of English are mixing together.

Developmental stages in the formation of epicentres of English

Introduction

English today is the most widely spoken language of the world with more non-native speakers than native speakers, and dominating in international communication, science, technology, military and peacekeeping activities, as a result of centuries of history of peaceful and not peaceful relations, explorations, colonization, exploitation, economic and cultural contacts.

English has two layers: the international one (or pan-regional) and the national one (or local), this last is observed through a consideration on pluricentricity (considering the various standard varieties of a language and their centers of diffusion and development [for example, this is the case of English, Spanish and French]) and epicentricity.

The omnipresence raises political and teaching questions, like what norms should be taken in consideration inside nations for purposes like administration or education.

Three overlapping circles or a common core with peripheries

The question of English worldwide began in the 1970s when Braj Kachru attacked the traditional view of English as still a single language, but instead that English is a language that reflected cultural patterns and proposed three overlapping circles: the Inner Circle constituted by mother tongue nations (375 million L1 speakers), the Outer Circle by second language countries (375 million L2 speakers), and the Expanding Circle where English is learned and taught as a foreign language (750 million EFL speakers).

Moag added the notion of:

• Basal language: situation of a minority of native speakers in a context with other languages or second language English which are common (as in parts of India or East Africa).
• Developmental element: English would pass through a life-cycle in which it would shift from foreign to second language and back, such as Malaysia which moved from the Outer to the Expanding Circle and nowadays vice versa.

McArthur's Circle of Englishes and Wheel Model proposing a distinction based on standardization and standard varieties of English (Canadian, American, Caribbean, British, Australian and Pacific, African, East Asian, South Asian) by three concentric circles: a central circle corresponding to the idealisation of a ‘World Standard English’, best represented as ‘written international English’, followed by a second circle of regional standards or standards that are emerging, and an outer circle comprising of localised varieties. However, the model is incomplete since the second circle conflates the three very different types ENL, ESL, and EFL.

Algeo's work is focused on differences between American and British English in lexico-grammatical patterns.

All models lack intra-varietal sociolinguistic variations and diachronic and developmental stages. This last point is partly covered by Schneider's Dynamic Model, with five stages (foundation, exonormative stabilization, nativization, endonormative stabilization and differentiation). Each of these stages presents four different parameters: sociopolitical background (historical and political situations), identity constructions (of the parties involved), sociolinguistic condition (language use by society), linguistic effects in language varieties. It goes without saying that, this model is ideal, but in reality we need to consider variation and overlapping stages.

Schneider's Dynamic Model

His model has five stages (foundation, exonormative stabilization, nativization, endonormative stabilization and differentiation) and each of these stages with four different parameters: sociopolitical background (historical and political situations), identity constructions (of the parties involved), sociolinguistic condition (language use) linguistic effects in language varieties. The various stages might be shorter or longer, overlapping or separated by crucial events.

Generally speaking, the process goes from the transplantation of a range of dialects into new countries where they interact with each other and with the indigenous languages or other migrant languages, till they establish locally and, internal regional, social or ethnic dialects emerge, so that the new variety becomes epicentric and internally pluricentric (as Australian English marked by ethnic varieties).

This model raises some problems:

• Schneider aims to account for all varieties of English irrespective of historical or social function, which are actually responsible for differences into varieties of English in the single nations: for example, the construction of the British Empire from the sixteenth to twentieth century, the Industrial Revolution of the United States, the Spanish-American war which enabled United States to acquire the Philippines as a colony, which revealed to be relevant to the formation of English in Asia and China.
• He talks of his model being cyclic, but he doesn't precise about the possibility of regressions and new starts: for example, a variety may lose its independence or become integrated from basilect, via mesolect, to acrolect.

A habitat model

The habitat model developed by Leitner considers contact as fundamental since it implies change in the languages involved, their status, functions, increases and subsequent decreases multilingualism, introduces linguistic hierarchies, etc.

The developments are not limited to the interaction at the time of transplantation, but include also the under way languages, varieties and events: Cameroon English, after the unification with French Cameroon, came under the influence of Cameroon French, reflecting the period of contact.

Trudgill and Schneider assume that varieties develop out of a circumscribed set of transplanted dialects and enter in a new country in a uniform manner, but this is not true as certain examples display:

• In the mutiny on the Bounty, a small number of native speakers returned to Tahiti, robbed women and men and settled in the island of Pitcairn, developing the Pitcairn English creole; they increased to several hundreds of speakers and moved to Norfolk Island, where the language acquired local features and turned into Norfolk English; later, it was integrated into Australian English.
• Cape Barren English was a pidgin based on English dialects spoken by whalers and sealers with Cape Barren aboriginals; the variety was integrated into Australian English.

The Habit Model assumes that there is always an on-going outside contact:

• American English had a formative role on Australian English from the beginning, since in the mid-nineteenth century American engineers came to Australia to set up company subsidiaries, bringing American popular culture.
• Cultivated variety in Australia couldn't develop as an individual deliberate choice, but it needed the influence of the Received Pronunciation of England: in fact, a number of its features had not been part of the original input and could only be due to late nineteenth-century immigration. So Schneider's endonormative stabilization should permit to be followed by an exonormative stabilization.
• Many varieties of English in urban areas have adopted a high rising tone expressing statement, or the discourse particle "like": this can only occur as a result of a global sharing against a conservative telling of information, and they can't be due to the influence of American English only, since they appear in many other varieties and other languages.

Irish English and Dublin English in Damien Dempsey's lyrics

History of English in Ireland

Old English is the second Germanic language to arrive in Ireland after Old Norse. It was introduced by Anglo-Normans together with Norman French in the late twelfth century: English was the local vernacular spoken by Viking invaders and settlers.

Certain measures (such as the Statutes of Kilkenny) tried to extirpate the Irish language at the advantage of English, but also the descendants of the Normans assimilated Irish, while English was spread only within the Pale, the area around Dublin.

Between the latter half of the sixteenth century, with Queen Mary I, Elizabeth I, the Stuart and Cromwell's policy, English was superimposed on the populations to deal with local administrations, courts of law and national politics.

Irish decline was very slow: its lowered social status and the bilingualism led to a slow transition to modern Irish English. The fatal blow to Irish language was given by the Great Famine and its subsequent diaspora when Irish linked with starvation and disease became associated with ignorance and misery, while English was the language of the National Schools and the Catholics.

Irish has never recovered since then, and despite the attempts to revitalise it, its number of speakers dropped.

Studies on Irish English

There are two main views on the origin of Irish English:

• Substratist or substratumist view: language contact brought to variation and the influence on the Ireland English variety.
• Superstratis or retentionist view: the retention of features of the earlier dialects or forms of English contributed to Ireland English variety as different from the one of England.

Until the 1980s contact explanation (1) was favoured, but by 1990s the pendulum swung to the opposite direction (2).

Another question is the naming problem of the language spoken in Ireland. Anglo-Irish was first used with reference to Anglo-Irish dialect and Literature, till it was considered that this label gives the idea of Irish qualified by Anglo features. Later, the term was replaced by definitions such as the English language in Ireland, Anglo-Irish Idiom, Irish English and Hiberno-English from Latin "Hibernia" meaning Ireland, but considered to be an obscure derivation.

Dublin English

Dublin non-vernacular speech has possibly become a sort of supraregional quasi-standard variety, and Irish people in the rest of the country consider and use it as a nonlocal form of Irish English.

A very gross classification of Dublin English is the North and South Dublin, also consisting in a social distinction: the upper-class South Dubliners (sometimes referred to as Dortspeak to tease its posh accent), are considered to be the antithetical to the North Dubliners working-class speech.

Hickey proposes another distinction of three varieties:

• Local vernacular: spoken by traditional conservative Dubliners and characterized by its accent,
• Non-local vernacular, labelled "Dublin 4": metropolitan population variety which do not wish to identify with the traditional Dublin variety, subdivided in:
• Variety of national broadcasting, RTE (Ireland National Television) and universities,
• Variety of post-Celtic Tiger Dublin (Celtic Tiger refers to the strong economy from 1990s to 2000s).

However, Dublin English seems to confirm its conservative character probably due to the phenomenon of the "colonial lag" (tendency of the colony to cease its development and not to separate completely from its homeland).

Irish English and Dublin English in Damien Dempsey's lyrics

The recent international success of Irish literature in all its forms, cinema and music, and very popular bands as U2 and the Cranberries are labeled as Globalized Celtic Revival. Today's Ireland, moving toward Globalisation, incorporates incoherent politics, cultural crisis, capitalist societies, and in particular a context between modernity and tradition, progress and nostalgia.

Interesting for the analysis of the Irish English and Dublin English are the folksinger Dempsey's lyrics enjoying a great success in Ireland especially among the young people. In fact, he incorporates the tradition of the Irish bards, language, melodies, rhythms which are typical of Dublin musical tradition. But he also includes social and political themes such as the recent economic boom, Dublin's city life, drugs, violence, poverty, social uncertainty, unemployment.

His North-Dublin working class accent and vocabulary is definitely a fundamental identitarian feature which reminds the sense of place and popular tradition, through:

• General slang terms: gimme, trendy, to go dry = to quit drinking
• American blues: little baby, babe
• American vernacular: gonna, outta, fellas
• Rastafarianism: references to Jah
• Drug related street speech: going straight = abstinence from drugs, go insane
• Irish slang: lad and lass = young boys and girls, liquor = alcoholic beverage, craic = entertainment and fun
• Dublin street vernacular: no mun no fun = no money no fun, a few shuggles on the kisser = a few punches in the mouth = patience, spliff = marijuana cigarette, delf = crockery
• Modern English: sup (from sip) = small quantity of liquid
• Swords (commonplace to depict everyday life and language of a working-class: hoor (from whore) has undergone a semantic shift with sympathetic and affectionate connotations.
• Irish Gaelic: galore = in abundance, poteen = distilled spirit, seanchai = storyteller, uillean = elbow, banshee = mythological woman, diomas = proud (from which his family name Dempsey derives).
• Irish culture terms and geographical terms: Mountjoy prison, Gardiner Street, Holywell Road (home to the singer), bog = wetland, Amerikay = America, Paddy = paddy (Irishmen living abroad)
• Characters names: James Connolly, Daniel O'Connell, Brendan Behan, Christy Moore, Luke Kelly.

As far as concerning morphology and grammar from Irish English:

• Topicalization or fronting: foreground of the main topics to highlight them
• For+to+infinite, indicating purpose ("for to go")
• Subordinating pattern and+personal pronoun+ing-verb ("and you going")
• Existential there+singular be
• Periphrastic be (invariable)+ing-verb
• Overuse of definite article
• Inversed direct question in indirect ("tell why is there so much need")
• Causal "that": ("I feel shame that he came")
• Discourse markers and fillers: look, alright
• "Sure" in front position (due to Irish language had no words for yes or no)
• Past tense instead of perfect aspect

From Dublin English:

• "Them" as demonstrative ("them fellas")
• "Me" instead of "my"
• Second person pronouns: "ya" (singular), "youse" (plural)

In conclusion, we can see the Irishness of this singer while being also permeated by cultural globalization and modernity, locating him between renewal conservative, progress and nostalgia.

The case of the world meties in Canadian English

Canadian English and Cinderella

English in Canada has often been studied in relation to British and American English. Canada was Great Britain's largest settler colony after the independence of the United States, at least till the British North American Act of 1867. But American continued to influence Canadian language and culture.

Nowadays, bibliography on Canadian English may be consulted concerning the origin and peculiarities of Canadian English in the different regions of the country:

• Sandra Clarke and John Edwards investigated on pronunciation, morphology and syntax of Canadian English and stated with particular focus on the gradual exploration of the flora and fauna, the contact with Aboriginal peoples, France, immigrants first from Europe and later from all parts of the world.
• The Canadian Journal of Linguistics investigates and provides a map of Standard Canadian English, hybrid ethnic and cultural varieties: for example, the population of Italian origin which amount to about 1.500.000 creating the Italo-Canadian ethnolect also known as Italiese.
• Katherine Barber, editor of the Canadian Oxford Dictionary, published "Only in Canada, You Say", in which includes a list of words which are exclusively or strongly identified with Canadian English; the work is organized on fifteen major topics. On the book cover there are four pictures labelled "butter tart" (a special way of filling a tart), "double-double" (a coffee with double serving of both sugar and cream), "Loonie" (Canadian one dollar coin) and "Inukshuk" (stone sculpture typical of the Inuit).

Naming the natives

A Dictionary of Canadianisms on Historical Principles is useful for a historical record of words and expression covering various spheres of Canadian life and providing the meaning of terms and pronunciation and etymology.

But a dictionary is not a neutral list of terms, it reflects the selection and interpretation of a team of experts. In fact, the compilers decided not to include the entries "Aborigine", "Aboriginal", "Indigenous", "Tribe" into the Dictionary of Canadianisms, but for instance, reserved a ten-page space to "Indian" and its compounds, defining it as:

• A racial term (referred to Eskimos) or legal definition of Indians
• Children's game
• Person prone to exaggeration