Notes on World Englishes by Kirkpatrick & Deterding (2013)

 Kirkpatrick, A., & Deterding, D. (2013). World Englishes. In J. Simpson (Ed.), The Routledge handbook of applied linguistics. London: Routledge. 

I. Models of World Englishes

-McArthur’s (1998) Circle of World Englishes; most influential is Kachru’s Three Circles of English (p. 373)

-the language, not be seen in monolithic standards; “variation is the norm” (p. 374).

-Kachru’s model in resonse to single-standard orthodoxy of the time; Englishes still lies in pluralism and inclusivity.

-Criticisms to Kachru: historically and geographically based; countries rather than societies; lack of foresight to group transitions.

-Jenkins (2009), deals with countries rather than societies and individuals; transition of countries (e.g. Denmark and Argentina from Expanding circle to Outer circle even without colonial links; disallow possibility of L1 English speakers in places such as Singapore and India.

II. Linguistic motivations

- fundamental principle in Word Englishes study: it’s variation and change are natural and inevitable (p.374). Half of the forty-six varieties of English do not mark the third person singular –s (p. 375).

-even Inner Circle/ New Englishes characterized by variation in pronunciation, spelling and grammar. Examples: rich present tense inflection. In the US: English of the American South and AAVE.

-Motivations for change: morphosyntactic change according to variety type (‘deleters’ or ‘preservers’; VU), language contact, and geography.

III. Linguistic features

-Dental fricatives: [θ]->[t] in Singapore, the Philippines, Brunei, Ireland, New York; [θ]->[f] in Hong Kong English, speaker in London; [θ]->[s] in Nigerian English; [s] as in [sre] in connected speech; absence of dental fricatives may become a standard in the future

-Final consonant clusters: reduction as in Standard Malay borrowed word lif (lift), arkitek (‘architecht’), saintis (‘scientist’) and in the RP ‘next day’, ‘last chance’, ‘old man’; simplification is a trace of the historical dev’t of English, may soon be more prevalent.

-Rhythm: English as stressed-based but reported to be syllable-based in New Englishes, i.e. Singapore, the Philippines, India, Nigeria, etc. (p. 377); syllable based rhythm might become a norm.

-Absence of tense marking: in narrating an event in Singapore and Brunei English, as well as in British English from a corpus (pp. 377-378); already present in English varieties both Inner and new.

-Non/Count nouns: idiosyncratic turned logical in New Englishes as in furnitures, clothings, equipments. Inner Circle example: mail (noncount) but emails (count); frequency might lead to regularization; more reliable acceptable when it comes from someone you look up to or in authority. It might be wrong now but who know in the future, ahead of our time.

-Invariant tags: “is it” & “isn’t it” occurs in Singapore and Nigerian English; “innit” in Wales, and speakers of Estuary English (pp. 378-379).

-Topic prominence: present in New and Inner Circle Englishes; today, grammars based in the corpora informal and spoken data, future description of Inner-Circle English will reflect common occurrence of this feature. Natural process in human language, favored and accepted in World Englishes.

-General trends in linguistic features: simplification and regularization (pp. 380-381); ahead of his time. Superstrata vs substrata paradigm; salvage, presedentiable, celebrant

-Three stages by Kachru: non-acceptance with preference to colonial/Inner-Circle variety; local and imported varieties existing side-by-side; acceptance of local variety as standard (p. 381)

-Schneider refined and extended the latter in his model: Foundation; Exonormative Stabilization; Nativization; Endormative Stabilization; Differentiation (p. 381); offer model in the dev’t of New Englishes: sedimentation, rough metaphor but yeah.

- New Englishes spoken and written codes both allow variation; examples from Asian and African writers’ use of local varieties of English to represent culture; US: Mark Twain and John Steinbeck, Ernest Hemingway

V. Recent developments

-ELF at present as used in intercultural communication: avoidance of local lexis.

-In the context of linguistic imperialism, a Cambodian ministry official said: ‘You know, when we use English, we don’t think about the United States or England. We only think about the need to communicate” (p. 383); mutually intelligible

VI. Influence of new technology

-“New technology therefore helps maintain balance between global and local features in the development of World Englishes” (p. 383) as supported by blogs and electronic corpora.