Riassunto personale derivato dallo studio integrato del libro consigliato "Postcolonial English"

Ancestry: introduction to pces

Understanding post colonial Englishes (pces)

Pces (post colonial Englishes) are varieties of English determined by the sociohistorical conditions. Human beings usually associate especially with other humans living closer and have less contact with people living far or in different social conditions. The study of pces investigates regional, social and other types of language variation. The popular idea that there is only one standard and correct form of English is misguided, since we find varieties in vocabulary, pronunciations, and syntactic arrangement of sentences.

Regional variation and dialect geography

The first parameter that was taken into consideration by linguists was the regional variation through the dialect geography: speakers from different countries, regions, or even villages speak differently and can be recognized, for example, by their accents, regional words, and grammar. Since 1920 in the USA and 1940 in England, dialect geographers collected differences, especially between English of Britain and North America. It takes a long time for regional speech differences to emerge, even though in some communities regional differences prevailed, such as American English, Caribbean, Australia, and New Zealand.

Sociolinguistics

In the 1960s, linguists began to consider not only regional differences but also social background such as social class, education, and sex. The discipline of sociolinguistics can be subdivided into two major branches: "macro-sociolinguistics" concerning language varieties in a society (multilingualism, diglossia...) and "micro-sociolinguistics" concerning individual language variants and language groupings.

Creole languages

While early theories about creole focused on the distinctness of creoles from English, from 1990 recent linguists recognized the gradual formation of creoles and in fact, it seems impossible to delimitate them precisely. However, both pidgins and creoles are products of language contact.

Approaches to the study of pces

The study of pces evolved. Bolton made his English studies on the sociology of language, pidgin, and creole studies, applied linguistics, critical linguistics, lexicography, and linguistic futurology. In general, two models of pces have been suggested to categorize the varieties of worldwide English.

• ENL, ESL, and EFL countries: The first model builds upon a distinction of ENL countries (English as a Native Language), ESL countries (English as a second language), and EFL countries (English as a foreign language).

In ENL countries, English is the vernacular language used by the majority of the population (like in Britain, USA, Australia). In ESL countries, English exists together with strong indigenous languages and is widely spoken often assuming official functions, as in politics, media, jurisdiction, higher education (as in Ghana, Nigeria, India, Singapore, etc.). In EFL countries, English has not an official function and is acquired through formal education because of its special international usefulness in business, the sciences, technology, etc. (as in Israel, Egypt, etc.).

Even though this model has been found useful, it ignores more complex realities such as the presence of non-native speakers, indigenous or immigrant in ENL countries, native speakers of English in ESL countries (like Hong Kong people of English origin), or the complex reality of an officially multilingual country like South Africa which cannot be categorized clearly, situations that represent those recent realities where the ENL - ESL distinction is obsolete.

• Kachru's Three Circles model: This distinguishes countries in the Inner Circle, Outer Circle, and Expanding Circle almost corresponding to the ENL, ESL, and EFL distinction. It places greater emphasis on the Outer Circle and the Expanding Circle and emphasizes that the English language belongs to all those who use it.

Both these models have remained superficial and ignore recent complex realities.

• Melchers and Shaw's scheme: This includes standardization, prestige, speakers' proficiency, and ideologies like conservatives (assimilation of less powerful groups), liberals (the equality of all language varieties), and radicals (fighting English by political action).

The approaches have been arranged along two dimensions: "attention to linguistic structure" (focusing on the structural properties like phonology, lexis, and grammar) and "level of generality" of the investigations. The combinations of these parameters generate four categories.

• Category A theoretical: It focuses on the sociolinguistic and linguistic scenarios in which pces have evolved and on general questions of language variation, second language acquisition, language shift, language change under specific types of contact conditions.
• Category B political: Focuses on political questions with little interest in linguistic structure and sociolinguistic issues in countries concerning the uses of languages, the creation of a sense of nationhood but also group tensions.
• Category C descriptive: Focuses on detailed language description, including micro-sociolinguistic investigations.
• Category D applied: Focuses on language pedagogy and other practical needs, like which forms to be accepted as correct and questions of "how to teach English in a country".

Of course, certain schools and individuals, and different linguistic and political positions, prefer certain approaches over others. It is interesting to observe that scholars from developing countries tend to be more interested in practical needs and applied language (political), while scholars from other countries tend to be more interested in theoretical questions: both positions are legitimate and complement each other.

Alternative perspectives and issues: nativeness, norms of correctness, global English

Nativeness

The traditional view holds that only native speakers fully command a language and can have proper linguistic intuitions, but recently it's widely believed that competence in a language is tied to its constant use. In other words, to the "first language native (vernacular) speakers": this would include minorities of native speakers of English (like Indians or Sri Lankans) whose intuitions may differ from those of British or American people and speakers who shifted to using English only or predominantly in everyday life.

Norms of correctness

There is the issue of establishing norms of correctness since pces are characterized by linguistic variability, hybrid forms given by contact with indigenous languages, and non-standard English forms (not accepted in formal situations). Also, the variation between spoken and informal signals the social status of the speaker or the different context. In fact, there are contexts that require formal English, generally known as "Standard English" and tied to a non-regional vocabulary and the grammar of the written language; about pronunciation, there is no international norm, even though British English is considered the standard pronunciation.

This also led to the question of which norms are accepted in formal contexts such as teaching, opening debates between conservative and more liberal language observers. The norms-setting is supposed to be based not only on the standard correctness but also as pragmatically appropriate, on public and private forms, written and spoken, formal and informal.

Global English

The global spread of English led to political debates: there's generally a tendency to consider Britain and other ENL countries as the centers in order to establish norms of correctness, while the pces are considered peripheral and deviating, evaluated negatively. English is often accused of linguistic imperialism which oppresses indigenous languages, dialects, and cultures, while others consider it the road to economic prosperity and improved life conditions. In many pces countries, parents need to decide whether to give priority to the preservation of language and culture or the pursuit of happiness on an economic basis.

In many instances, this process has been accompanied by military invasions, especially in colonial history, where settlers occupy territories belonging to indigenous groups by force, determining also the speed of the linguistic evolution.

The evolution of Postcolonial Englishes

The Dynamic model: language contact, processes, perspectives, scenarios (Mufwene and Thomason)

Pces emerged in language contact situations. While in the past linguistics emphasized the purity and homogeneity of languages, recently it has been recognized the language contact theory.

Thomason theory is based on several points:

• Linguistic clines of contact: the closer the contact and the higher the degree of contact effects; light contact leads simply to lexical borrowings, while stronger contacts may cause creolization or even the creation of mixed languages.
• The structural effects of language contact depend especially on social conditions.
• Contact-induced change can be achieved through several mechanisms: code-switching, code alternation, second-language acquisition, bilingualism.
• All generalizations and predictions about language contact are based on observable cases and not on firm rules, and any theory is only an approximation.

Mufwene's theory of the ecology of language evolution is based on population genetics and biology and linguistics, among which he sees important parallels:

• He considers language evolution as speakers making selections from a pool of linguistic variants available consisting of the sum of the forms and variants used by every speaker.
• Variants from this pool are chosen depending upon the "ecology" of the contact situation, in other words, the conditions and circumstances like numerical demography and social relationships, amount and types of communicative events, similarities between the languages involved.
• The "competition of features", by which a new variety of English is generated, occurs in the pool of linguistic options consisting of elements of diffusion (from English) and elements of selection (that are the innovations adopted in a language).
• Basing on the "founder principle" in biology, he believes that the structural features are predetermined in the early phase of contact while things are still in flux, in other words, by the characteristics of the vernaculars of the earliest populations.
• Mufwene employs the metaphor of a language as a parasite upon its host population.
• The diffusion of the linguistic forms proceeds through "imperfect replication": speakers copy each other's linguistic choices vertically (generation by generation) and horizontally (speakers interacting with each other). Idiolects also are continuously influenced.

Mufwene considers dialects and new Englishes and creoles as products of the same competition and selection process where the only difference is a quantitative one: creoles emerge by the selection of more xenolectal (a language variety that bears a superficial resemblance to another larger language, but which differs at a fundamental structural level) features while dialects by the selection of a large number of lexifier (superstratus or dominant language that provides for the majority of vocabulary).

Linguistic contacts depend on socio-historical conditions, for example, the process of colonial expansion was given by a variety of motives like economic, political, military, and religious. Mufwene distinguishes three types of colonization determining linguistic contacts:

• Settlement colonization: led to interactions between several varieties of European languages, also integrating social and regional varieties; for example, in plantation settlements colonies, the interaction between Europeans and farmhands led to creolization and variants of the lexifier were adopted as the vernacular.
• Exploitation colonies: larger territories under European control, typically established in the nineteenth century, marked by social segregation and unequal power stratification. The European lexifier was introduced only to a local managerial group allowing interaction between colonizers and colonized; the lexifier generally expanded its range of uses to new internal communicative functions.
• Trade colonization: sporadic contacts for the exchange of commodities allowing limited access for local populations to the lexifier.

In some cases, Europeans migrated to new continents and due to their increasing numbers and military and economic superiority, they established themselves as the dominant power. Other colonies imported laborers from elsewhere and reserved managerial roles to themselves.

It is interesting to know that these distinctions are important mostly for the early phases of settlement, but they tend to get increasingly blurred in the course of time with the complexity of societies.

Social identity and linguistic accommodation

Central is the notion of social identity, of individuals and collectives, based on similarities and differences. Human beings are social beings who need to associate themselves with others and form groups because this offers a higher degree of safety: they need to share beliefs and values, history, symbolic codes like clothing, and, of course, linguistic expressions, drawing a line between "us" and the "others" perceived as different. Language also creates different identities, even based on pronunciation details.

Speakers who wish to create a social bond between will minimize any linguistic difference to increase the set of shared features and break linguistic separators. Thomason calls this mechanism "negotiation", a process that takes time and can be defined as a new compromise variety based on the features shared.

Furthermore, identities are not stable or clear-cut and the creation of the identity is a dynamic process. Especially in modern societies, identities are based upon several parameters, like national, ethnic, racial, class, rank, and professional, and can be primordial or situational (depending upon circumstances).

In the process of the creation of the pces, the individual parties who came in contact defined and redefined themselves based on the other groups around, their own historical roots, culture and traditions, relationship to territories, their political and military role. Of course, as these relationships changed, so did their identities, creating a sort of parallelism between identity construction and linguistic evolution.

Rationale and overview

Some authors pointed out similarities between certain countries and varieties but regard them as independent of each other. The evolution of pces consists of a sequence of stages of identity rewritings and associated linguistic changes in a colonial contact. In the process, we need to distinguish between colonizers and colonized or "us" and "others": in the beginning, settlers in a foreign land consider themselves as an extension of the "us", but in the course of time, bonds with the former homeland weaken becoming "other", together with the creation of a new "us" in the indigenous population. Similarly, from the perspective of the indigenous population, the group of immigrants initially distinguished as the "others" but slowly turning into "us" through integration. In this process, negotiation occurs, through linguistic usage and identity changes.

Identity rewritings and associated linguistic changes are described as a diachronic sequence of five stages, which goes from the transplantation of English to a new land and, after a period of vibrant changes social and linguistic, to the stabilization of the variety. The five stages are: 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), and 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.

The entire process can be viewed from two complementary perspectives: that of the colonizers and that of the colonized. In the settlers, English is continuously transmitted without a language shift (or break), even though it undergoes modification; in the indigenous, it is exposed to a dominant foreign language which is adopted as a second language, possibly followed by language shift.

In general, two groups sharing a piece of land increasingly share a common language: ideally the end result is the convergence into a single language, but in practice, especially in complex societies, this uniformity is usually not reached. However, the overall trend is an increasing convergence.

The Dynamic Model of the evolution of Postcolonial Englishes

To better explain the process, we use the Dynamic Model of the evolution of Postcolonial Englishes:

• Regardless of the location, pces have emerged through a mostly uniform process described of five stages (foundation, exonormative stabilization, nativization, endonormative stabilization, and differentiation).
• Colonizers' language gets closer and closer to the colonized language in the course of time.
• The stages also lead to the reconstruction of group identities.

Dynamic model of the evolution of Pces: phase 1 foundation

Sociopolitical background

In the initial stage, English is brought to a new territory by settlers, a territory which was not English-speaking before, through military forts, trading outposts, or emigration settlements. Relationships may be friendly or hostile: cooperation like in Singapore or India, or violence and military dominance like America or Australia.

Identity constructions

Both groups become aware of the other's existence, seeing themselves as distinct from the other. Settlers, many will stay temporarily, others hope to build a cultural copy of their homeland. Indigenous regard themselves as the only rightful residents.

Sociolinguistic conditions

There are two types of contact: dialect contact, resulting from contact of speakers from different regions of Britain; or interaction between settlers and indigenous. In the beginning, communication between settlers and indigenous is exclusively utilitarian: each group continues to communicate in its own language except for limited purposes.