Language Variation and the Spread of English Around the World

Posted on Oct 13, 2024 in Social sciences

Language Variation

Two Major Types of Language Varieties

Register

Associated with different circumstances and purposes. Types: CONV (Conversation), FICT (Fiction), NEWS (News), ACAD (Academic Prose). These registers can be compared by:

Mode (spoken or written)
Interactiveness and real-time production
Shared situation
Main communicative purpose/content (personal communication, pleasure reading, information/evaluation, argumentation/explanation)
Audience (individual, wide-public, specialist)

Dialects

Associated with speaker(s) or writer(s) identity (gender, socioeconomic class, etc.). The distinction between dialects can be general (British English vs. American English) or specific (e.g., Cockney).

Other Types of Variation

Standard and Non-Standard (Vernacular)

Not only one form of a grammatical feature is accepted in Standard English. Little variability is due to dialect differences in Standard English, between British English and American English. One well-known example is the use of two forms for the past participle of the verb get in American English (got and gotten), whereas British English has only one (got).

Prescriptive Grammar

Dictates how people should use the language, e.g., who vs. whom when referring to humans.

Descriptive Grammar

Describes the actual patterns of use and the reasons for these patterns.

English Around the World

Present-day status is a result of the expansion of British colonial power and the emergence of the USA as the leading economic power of the 20th century. There are countries with English as:

First language (L1)
Second language (L2)
Foreign language

English’s status is also defined by a conscious process of language planning.

Quirk et al.

Objective standards to establish the relative importance of a language are:

Number of speakers
Number of countries and continents it is used in
Extent to which it is necessary
Purposes it is used for
Extent to which it is the medium of highly valued cultural manifestations
Economic and political influence of the native speakers of a language

He also stated, “The choice of an international language or lingua franca is never based on linguistic or aesthetic criteria but always on political, economic, and demographic ones.”

Crystal

English’s special status and reasons to learn it:

Historical

The proceedings of a country’s main institutions may be carried out in English because of British and American imperialism antecedents.

Internal Political

Role to provide a neutral form of communication between a country’s different ethnic groups.

External Economic

USA’s dominant economic position.

Practical

Main language of international tourism, business, air traffic control, and academic conferences.

Intellectual

Most scientific, technological, and academic information in the world is expressed in English, as is the information stored in electronic recovery systems.

Entertainment

Main language of popular music, satellite broadcasting, home computers, and video games.

“Wrong Reasons”

Although English doesn’t have many inflectional endings, its grammar isn’t easy and it has a highly complicated syntax.

The Spread of English Around the World

Visualized as three concentric circles:

Inner Circle

The traditional bases of English, where it is the primary language (core countries): USA, UK, Ireland, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand.

Outer or Extended Circle

English has become part of a country’s main institutions and plays an important second language role (outer core countries), e.g., Bahamas, Jamaica.

Expanding Circle

Nations which recognize the importance of English as an international language (fringe countries), e.g., Spain, China.

The most important fact is NOT the number of English L1 speakers but its usefulness and functionality outside its native domain. In this sense, English can be considered a lingua franca (a language used for communication among people of different mother tongues).

For example, South Africa or Malaysia portray a sociolinguistic situation which contains a mixture of second and foreign language features. Countries like Tanzania or Kenya have changed their language policy after becoming independent from England, while others like Nigeria use varieties of English whose status as a first or foreign language isn’t always clear.

English as a first language has around 377 million speakers and around 375 million as a second language. The number of L1 Spanish speakers is getting closer every day to those of English, with a baby boom of more Spanish-speaking children as first language speakers. This will have a great effect on the global linguistic landscape in the later part of the 21st century.

Antagonism Towards English

English isn’t always welcomed. It has borrowed many words, but people complain about the excessive influence of English on their language. This is a form of antagonism, and some countries have adopted legal measures to stop this borrowing process.

Three other forms of antagonism are:

The fear of lexical invasion. Throughout history, there have been cases in which English has supplanted other languages, such as Welsh or Cornish. Even countries that haven’t had an English colonial history, like Denmark or Iceland, fear this lexical invasion.
The objection to English having an official status in some countries like Kenya or India because it’s associated with colonial history.
Since a good command of English is usually restricted to an elite, political resentment against a minority second language is expected because it only brings benefits to those who are skilled in it.

Threats to English Within the Inner Circle

English can also be threatened within the inner circle in mainly two ways:

Standard English users might become worried about the spread of vernacular English, especially one which shows a mixture of linguistic influences. Code-mixing is produced in all those places in which English is spoken together with another language; it’s a normal feature of bilingualism, e.g., Spanglish.
The growth of an immigrant language in a country, which gradually results in the process of language shift, with second and third generations of non-English-speaking immigrants adopting the language of their host state.

The Future of English

Two opposite forces are influencing the development of English:

One that promotes a uniform World Standard English
The other acts to preserve national identity, promoting a diverse set of regional Standard Englishes

Very strong pressure on behalf of the media, the world stock markets, and many other institutions is carried out to guarantee international intelligibility. In the same way, there is also very strong pressure to promote national identity. One of the consequences of triumphant nationalism is the early adoption of speech forms marking a linguistic distance between the new nation and its colonial antecedent.

Two factors help this distancing:

The adoption of some of the characteristics, especially the vocabulary and the prosody, of those languages that come in contact with English.
The fact that English is found all over the world means that it will be used to express an unparalleled range of fauna, flora, and cultural features. Thus, each English-speaking country will find itself with thousands of words to express its local character. Depending on the extent to which the world is interested in a word, it will be viewed as world standard (e.g., apartheid) or regional standard.

Language Variation: Two Major Types

Register

Associated with different circumstances and purposes. Types: CONV, FICT, NEWS, ACAD, which can be compared by mode (spoken-written), interactiveness and real-time production, shared situation, main communicative purpose/content (personal communication, pleasure reading, information/evaluation, argumentation/explanation), and audience (individual, wide-public, specialist).

Dialects

Other Types of Variation

Standard and Not Standard (Vernacular)

Not only one form of a grammatical feature is accepted in Standard English; little variability is due to dialect differences in Standard English, between British English and American English. One well-known example is the use of two forms for the past participle of the verb get in American English (got and gotten), whereas British English has only one (got).

Prescriptive Grammar

How people should use the language, e.g., who vs. whom when referring to humans.

Descriptive Grammar

Describes the actual patterns of use and the reasons for these patterns.

Words

Basic Elements of Language

Defined in dictionaries
Relatively fixed in their internal form but independent in their role in larger units

Orthographic Words

Words that we are familiar with in written language, separated by spaces.

Grammatical Words

Fall into different grammatical classes, e.g., flowers (noun) and flowers (verb).

Lexemes

Share the same basic meaning, similar forms, and the same word class.

Token

Each occurrence of a word in a written or spoken text, e.g., “The girl plays with the ball” (6 tokens).

Types

Different vocabulary items that occur in a text, e.g., “The girl plays with the ball” (5 types).

Families of Words

Lexical Words

Nouns, lexical verbs, adjectives, and adverbs
Open classes, e.g., suffix -ee: referee
Often complex internal structure, composed of several parts: un-image-able, but can also consist of a single morpheme
Can be heads of phrases
Normally remain when sentences are compressed (e.g., “Spain wins World Cup”)

Function Words

Prepositions, coordinators, auxiliary verbs, and pronouns
Show how units relate to each other
Closed classes, e.g., only four coordinators: and, or, but, and nor

Inserts

Mainly in spoken language, inserted freely in a text
Often marked off by a break in intonation in speech or by a punctuation mark in writing, e.g., “Well, he managed.”

Structure of Words: Morphology

Lexical words can consist of a single morpheme (a stem like book) or have a complex structure created by three different processes:

Inflection

Doesn’t change the word’s identity, e.g., plural and past tense.

Derivation

Changes the word’s identity. New lexical words can be created by adding different affixes (prefixes and suffixes), thus containing several morphemes, e.g., convers+ation+al.

Compounding

A form of derivation which leads to more complex words. Compound words contain more than one stem, e.g., flowerpot. Combinations: N+N (noun+noun), V+N (verb+noun), ADJ+N (adjective+noun), N+ADJ (noun+adjective).

Differences Between Compounds and Two Words

Compounds are written without spaces
The main stress is on the first element
The meaning can’t be determined from the individual parts, e.g., flowerpot (pot used to contain flowers) vs. flower pot (a pot made of flower)

Lexical Word Classes

Nouns

Common (can be modified by many kinds of words before and after them) and proper (rarely have modifiers)
Inflectional suffixes (plural number and genitive case)
Countable and uncountable
Normally refer to concrete, physical entities but can also denote abstract entities like qualities and states (e.g., loneliness)

Lexical Verbs

Primary ones: be, have, do (lexical and auxiliary)
The different forms signal: tense (present/past), aspect (perfect, progressive), and voice (active/passive)
Normally occur on their own as a single-word verb phrase acting as the central part of the clause
Can also occur in the final or main verb position of verb phrases (e.g., has bought)
Denote actions, processes, and states of affairs and define the role of human and non-human participants in them, e.g., you bought (action performed by you)
High density of verbs in conversation and fiction

Adjectives

Can take the inflectional suffixes -er (comparative) and -est (superlative)
Can be derived (e.g., spiteful) or compound (e.g., home-made)
Can occur as the head of an adjective phrase (e.g., very nice), mostly used as modifiers preceding the head of a noun phrase or as predicatives following the verb in clauses (e.g., “…a nice jumper”/”It’s a nice and warm jumper.”)
Describe qualities of people, things, and abstractions
Many are gradable (e.g., lively, rather lively, really lively)

Adverbs

Many are formed from adjectives by adding the suffix -ly (e.g., clearly), others not (e.g., just, never)
Some allow comparative and superlative forms: fast–faster–fastest
Occur as the head of adverb phrases (e.g., very noisily)
Often used as modifiers of an adjective or another adverb (e.g., really old)
Can act as adverbials (elements of clauses) in the clause. They can modify an action, process, or state by expressing time, place, and manner (e.g., “I’ll see you again soon.” “They were playing here.”). They can convey the speaker’s or writer’s attitude towards the information in the rest of the clause (e.g., “Surely she did it.”). They can also express a connection with what was said earlier (e.g., “It must be nice, though.”)
As modifiers, normally express the degree of a following adjective or adverb (e.g., totally wrong)

Borderline Cases in Classifying Words

Nouns and Verbs

Biggest problem: -ing forms, e.g., “The matter needed checking.” (word class unclear). If we add an adverb (e.g., carefully), then checking will be a verb, whereas if it was preceded by a modifying adjective, it would clearly be a noun (e.g., careful checking).

Nouns and Adjectives

The only way to tell the difference is by paraphrasing. If appropriate, construct a paraphrase. When the paraphrase uses a prepositional phrase, then it’s an -ing noun + noun (e.g., dancing shoes/shoes for dancing). A paraphrase with a relative clause (that, which, or who) is an -ing adjective + noun (e.g., enchanting child/a child who is enchanting).

Verbs and Adjectives

This occurs where the -ing form follows the verb be without other modifiers (e.g., “The film was amusing.”). If the -ing word can take an object, then it’s a verb (e.g., “…amusing us”). On the contrary, if the -ing word is gradable and can be modified by very, it is an adjective (e.g., “…very amusing.”)

Language Variation and the Spread of English Around the World