World Englishes

Unit 5
THE OUTER CIRCLE
Why is English
still used in
government
and law in so
many
postcolonial
countries?
 The varieties of English spoken in outer-
circle countries have been called ‘New
Englishes’, but the term is controversial.

 New versus new Englishes?

 The term "New Englishes" refers to regional and national varieties of
the English language used in places where it is not the mother tongue of the
majority of the population. The phrase is also known as new varieties of
English, non-native varieties of English, and non-native institutionalized
varieties of English.
 New Englishes have certain formal properties—lexical, phonological,
and grammatical—that differ from those of British or American standard
English. Examples of New Englishes include Nigerian English, Singapore
English, and Indian English.
 The Englishes of India, Nigeria and Singapore and many other outer-circle
countries do share a number of superficial linguistic characteristics which,
taken together, make it convenient to describe them as a group separately
from American, British, Australian,New Zealand, etc. varieties (Platt et al.
1984).
New versus new Englishes
 In an inner-circle region like Yorkshire there will be a wide variation among
speakers (and within a speaker for different situations) from strongly local speech
features to completely standard or nonlocal ones. Some members of the
community will have difficulty in expressing themselves in formal or written
Standard English.
 But most (excepting recent immigrants, for example) will have full proficiency in
some kind of English. Outer-circle speakers will vary not only in the degree to which
their English (in a given situation) has local features, but also in their proficiency in
English at all.
 In some situations those with low proficiency in English may be much more
proficient in pidgin or creole; in others the dominant language will be a local one.
 In any case, there are learner errors as well as varietal features. Where pidgin
English is widely used for communication among less educated speakers with
different mother tongues, or as an informal register.
  The pidgin will be the basilect and it will have a
reasonable-sized vocabulary and range of
functions; where another language performs these
functions, the ‘basilect’ is the English of low-
proficiency learners, characterised by limited
vocabulary and efficiency as a means of
communication.

Basilect  In this respect – variable proficiency in English -

the outer-circle varieties are like the expanding-
circle varieties. But they are like the inner-circle
varieties in that proficiency in a form which is only
comprehensible locally or nationally is useful and
effective within that scope.
 Nigerian English that is comprehensible to other
Nigerians is performing one of its main functions,
while China English that is only comprehensible to
other Chinese is redundant.
Phonology
 Many outer-circle varieties do not have ‘marked’ /θ/ and /ð/,
often replacing them with dental or alveolar stops of some
kind.
 /ð/ very rarely distinguishes words from one another and
substitution of /d/ causes little communicative difficulty (even
inner-circle speakers who say /ð/ often write da for the in
conversational writing).
 Since stress and intonation are closely related, the intonation
systems of outer-circle varieties are usually very different
from those of inner-circle ones, but they are usually fairly
different from one another as well, as the substrates have
different systems.
Syntax
 As with phonology, the outer-circle varieties often have features in common
because they tend to eliminate features which are typical of inner-circle
English but not of other languages (or which are inherently dispensable in
English).
 The details of usage are different in each variety, but the principle of using
one or two invariant phrases instead of the complex and variable system of
inner-circle English is constant. Similar but different simplifications occur for
confirmation questions:
 A: He’s lost his job. B: Has he? (US, UK, etc.)/Is it? (South African English, all
varieties, Indian English and so on.)
Lexis
 Outer-circle varieties tend to simplify the system and make these
words ordinary singulars with a general sense, so that one can speak
of a software, some softwares, a staff of the school, some staffs, or
an alphabet (= ‘a letter of the alphabet’).
 Platt et al. (1984) note that singular noncount words which refer to
genuinely uncountable substances like mud or abstractions like hope
are not converted in this way, making it more a rationalisation than a
simplification.
Pragmatics
 Some aspects of pragmatics are linguistic.
 In many languages the equivalent of yes means ‘what you said is true’
and no means ‘what you said is false’.
 So in West Africa, on the other hand, intimacy and solidarity are often
established by the use of kinship terms (brother, sister, auntie, uncle)
instead of terms like mate, dear, honey and so on, and this often
reflects substrate usage as well as perhaps cultural difference.
Paralanguage
 Paralanguage – gesture, facial expression and so on – and
proxemics are largely culturally determined.
 Many Indians and Sri Lankans shake their heads for ‘yes’ and
nod for ‘no’, for example, whether speaking English or another
language.
 The only generalization would be that the paralanguage
systems of outer-circle varieties are usually very different from
those of inner-circle ones, being based in different cultures.
South Asia:
India, Pakistan, Bangladesh
 Some features
 South Asian English is predominantly
spelt in the British style.
 In speech South Asian English often uses
the progressive with certain verbs that
are stative verbs in other varieties, so
that I am knowing is possible.
 New formations include co-daughter-in-
law, ‘husband’s brother’s wife’, co-
brother ‘wife’s sister’s husband’
English in India
today
 Despite continued pressure from nationalists,
English remains at the heart of Indian society.
It is widely used in the media, in Higher
Education and government and therefore
remains a common means of communication,
both among the ruling classes, and between
speakers of mutually unintelligible languages.
 Role of English as a neutral language of wider
communication.
 Despite being a three percent minority, the
English speaking population in India is quite
large: that three percent puts India among
the top four countries in the world with the
highest number of English speakers.
Indian English

 It is a linguistic variety with

its own grammatical, lexical,
phonological and discoursal
norms.
 It has developed its own
varietal characteristics
through the interaction of
Indian languages and social
behaviours with those of
English.
 The “Indianisation of English”
involves adaptations of
existing features of British
English and the use of
transferred mother-tongue
items where British English is
‘deficient’.
Indian English: Phonology
 V~W merger: many speakers do not differentiate
between the sounds <v> and <w>.
 TH-stopping: they sometimes replace <th> in words like
think and this with a <t> and <d> sound, as no Indian
languages contain these consonants.
 Rhoticity: the <r> sound is pronounced after a vowel in
words like hard, corn and nurse .
 Unaspirated <p>: there is no release of air when <p>
precedes a vowel in words like pin and pot
  Under the influence of traditional Hindi grammar, speakers often
use progressive tenses in statements, such as I am believing you
or she is liking music.
 Zero article: the indefinite article, a or an, or the definite
article, the, are often omitted.
 Zero past tense marker: verbs are left unmarked for tense,
although other signals (adverbs of time, such as yesterday, last
week etc.) often give linguistic clues about the timing of an
event.

Indian  Declarative word order in interrogative construction: ‘normal’

subject + verb word order is retained in statements using the
question words who, what, when, where, why, how etc. .

English:  Plural uncount nouns: litters, luggages, furnitures, woods .

Grammar
Indian English: Lexis
 Code-switching: the occasional or even frequent use of a Hindi (or
Urdu, Punjabi, Gujurati etc.) word or expression within an English
sentence can communicate a great sense of shared identity or
solidarity with other speakers.
 Extensive compound formation: English-speaking classes, cousin-
brother / cousin-sister, chalk-piece, key-bunch, meeting notice,
age barred, pindrop silence, time-pass.
 Shortening of words: ‘enthu’ for enthusiastic/enthusiasm or
‘fundas’ for fundamentals
 Acronyms: MCP = Male Chauvinist Pig - FOC = Free Of Charge
MPK = Maine Pyar Kiya (a popular movie)
ILU = I Love You (from a song; pronounced ee-lu)
ABCD = American Born Confused Deshi (native of India)
FOB = Fresh Off the Boat
Indian English: Usage
 “What’s your good name?”
 “Dear sir, with reference to your above see my below” - popular
opening line in official letters.
 “Pritam Singh has left for his heavenly above” - a death notice.
 “Hue and Cry notice” - title of police missing person newspaper
advertisement.
 “She freaked out last night” - she had a good time.
 “Kindly please advise me.”
 “Thank youji, Doctor Sahib.”
 “Namaste, how are you?”
 "Will you take tea?“
 “To give a test”
South East Asia
 In moving from Africa and India to South-East Asia we move to a
different economic environment.
 Singapore is a developed country with levels of education which are
among the highest in the World.
 The Hong Kong region of China is a fully developed world financial
and business centre with a high standard of living.
 Malaysia is a rapidly developing ‘Asian tiger’ economy.
 The Philippines are poorer, but better off in terms of average income
than the African or South Asian countries.
History
 The earliest civilisations in Malaysia and Indonesia arose as a result of
Indian expansion starting 2,000 years ago.
 From the eleventh century onwards Islamic missionaries and traders
appeared in the area and gradually Malaysia and most of Indonesia
became Muslim, often with a striking mixture of Indian and Islamic
traditions and styles.
 However, neither Hindu nor Islamic culture affected most people in
the Philippines. In 1565 they became a Spanish possession (under the
viceroy of Mexico) and consequently it was Spanish Catholic
missionaries rather than Hindu/Buddhists or Muslims who brought
‘higher religion’ to the islands.
Hong Kong & Philippines
 Hong Kong was returned to Chinese sovereignty in 1997. Today, English
is very widely used in the education and legal systems and to deal
with international business, and is becoming ‘localised’, and used to
some extent for everyday interaction among locals who all speak
Cantonese.

 The Philippines became independent of the USA in 1948. There were

indigenous lingua francas, and one of these, Tagalog, the language of
the Manila area, was chosen as the national language (and, after some
negotiation, renamed Filipino). The local languages are all related to
Tagalog, so Filipino is easier than English for local people to learn.
Hong Kong English
 Hong Kong came under British control as a
result of the Opium Wars with China and
developed as a trading centre. Throughout
the colonial period a minority of British
administrators and traders coexisted with a
large majority of Chinese traders and
labourers.
 Since most Chinese could speak Cantonese,
there was no need for a lingua franca, only
for a language to use with powerful
foreigners. Knowledge of English was spread
almost entirely through the education
system, which increasingly used English
Some terms considered peculiar to Hong Kong
English include:
 amah – a female domestic servant
 cha chaan teng – a tea and lunch shop
 dai pai dong – a street restaurant
 face – the act of losing, gaining or saving one’s reputation
 gweilo – a Caucasian male, possibly derogatory, literally meaning ‘ghost man’
 iron rice bowl – a secure job from which it would be difficult to be dismissed
 kowtow – a finger-based method of saying ‘thank you’ to the person serving tea
 lai see – money given as a gift in a red envelope
 Old China Hand – an expatriate with many years of experience in Hong Kong and/or
Mainland China
 sifu – a master craftsman
 tai-tai – the idle wife of a rich man
Philippines English  In 1898 ownership of the Philippines
passed to the USA. The Americans
launched a vigorous campaign of
education through the medium of
English, so that by independence in
1946 a rhotic variety of English with
US vocabulary was widely known
for administration and education,
and used among Filipinos with
different mother tongues.
 Virtually all Filipinos spoke one or
more local languages alongside it,
of course.
Some terms considered peculiar to
Philippine English include:
 Advance – Of a clock adjusted ahead of exact time.
 Bed spacing — The act of renting a bedroom at a private home, where rent for it is paid by
a lodger or boarder called a "bed spacer."
 Gimmick — A planned or unplanned night out with friends. Also, any offering during evening hours by
clubs, bars and restaurants to lure customers in.
 Kikay kit — A container where a woman's make-up and toiletries are kept.
 Load — Prepaid credits on a prepaid mobile phone. Load can be acquired by "electronic reloading".
As a verb, it generally means "to top up", including uses outside of mobile telecommunications.
 Ref – Clipping form of refrigerator, as opposed to fridge as used in most English varieties.
 Sala — A living room, borrowed from Spanish.
 Videoke — Karaoke or a karaoke box. First coined in the 1990s as a portmanteau
of video and karaoke
 Adidas- the term used to refer to a Filipino street food. These are grilled chicken feet that are
marinated in barbecue sauce or special mixture of herbs and spices like calamansi and brown sugar.
Singapore English

 The roots of Standard Singapore

English derive from nearly a
century and a half of British
control. Its local character seems
to have developed early in the
English-medium schools of the
19th and early-20th centuries,
where the teachers often came
from India and Ceylon, as well as
from various parts of Europe and
from the United States.
 The wide use of Singlish led the government to launch
the Speak Good English Movement in Singapore in 2000 in
an attempt to replace Singlish with Standard English.
 Although Standard Singapore English (SSE) is mainly
influenced by British English and, recently, American
English, there are other languages that also contribute to
its use on a regular basis.Malay, Indian, and Chinese
Influences
Singlish

 Colloquial Singaporean English, better known as Singlish, is an English-based

creole language spoken in Singapore. The term Singlish is a blend of
Singaporean slang and English and As English is one of Singapore's official
languages, Singlish is regarded as having low prestige.
The current situation: Malaysia and
Singapore
 English is now used for some tertiary education, and quite widely as
the language of business, where many firms are still dominated by
Chinese or Indian personnel. English is frequently used in workplaces,
often with variation between standard and more localised forms and
codeswitching into Malay according to situation and conversational
partner.
 Singapore, with a population speaking a variety of Chinese ‘dialects’,
Indian languages and local Malay, emphasised English as the main
official language. It has subsequently moved towards a policy which
aims at the Chinese community dropping the ‘dialects’ and
becoming bilingual in Mandarin Chinese (the official language of
mainland China and Taiwan) and English, Indians in an Indian
language and English, and Malays in Bahasa Malaysia and English.
Some features
 In Singapore an increasing proportion of speakers have English as a mother tongue – but the local
variety rather than Standard English, An American accent may be becoming more fashionable:
originally US pronunciation of individual words like schedule are said to be becoming more
common,and so is rhoticity.
 Given the possibility of omitting the subject and not inverting, questions of the form What to do?
Where to go? (‘What can/should I/we/she do?’, ‘Where can/should I/we/he go?’) are common and
characteristic of Singapore/Malaysian usage. In Chinese and South-East Asian languages questions
often include the equivalent of or (not)? as a question word, and correspondingly local English often
has questions like Want or not?You want tea or what? Can or not? Pain or not? (Gupta 1994).
 The various lects of Singapore/Malaysia English include a great deal of local vocabulary. Hong Kong
English shows more influence both from US varieties and from recent innovations in British English
than the Singapore variety. On the other hand, as more and more young people in Hong Kong are
English-educated and have friends and relations in Canada, the USA and Britain, English is more and
more a natural means of expression.
 Unlike all the varieties discussed in this chapter so far, Philippine English derives from US English,
normally uses US spelling conventions and vocabulary variants, and is rhotic.
Other countries

 The Mediterranean : Malta, Cyprus

 The Caribbean: The island of Puerto Rico
 Indian Ocean islands of the Seychelles and Mauritius
 Papua New Guinea and the Pacific
Africa
 Rwanda, where English is currently, quite remarkably,
replacing French as the language of government and
education.
 The process is driven by a desire to orient the country
towards the English-speaking East African Community, and
has public support because the Community is perceived as
offering job opportunities not available in the French-
speaking countries to the west
 Somalia, where the Somali language coexists with English and Italian
 Ethiopia, where secondary and higher education are mainly in English, but
most
 other state functions are in Amharic or a regional language
 Southern Sudan, where English is well established, and may shortly be the
official language of an independent South Sudan.
 The slave trade was abolished in the British Empire in 1807. In the West this led to its
gradual end as other countries decided, or were forced, to follow. There was also some
resettlement of freed slaves. From 1787 ex-slaves from Britain, North America and the
Caribbean settled or were settled at Freetown in Sierra Leone (and some at Banjul
(Bathurst) in Gambia).
 They spoke various kinds of creole English. English language higher education was
available at Fourah Bay College in Sierra Leone from 1827, and Sierra Leonean English
and/or Creole speakers spread as officials, teachers and missionaries all over West
Africa, probably contributing decisively to what is now West African Pidgin.
 From the 1820s freed slaves from the USA settled in Liberia and created a community
speaking a variety of American English
History
 On the west coast seaborne trade with Western countries increased quite
steadily.
 In the course of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries trade shifted from
gold and ivory to slaves, and from the Portuguese and Dutch to the French
and British. By the beginning of the nineteenth century English had become a
useful foreign language.
 Traders at centres like Calabar in Eastern Nigeria sent young men to learn
English and book-keeping in England and some locals in the main trading cities
knew English well.
 Written Nigerian English dates from as early as 1786 (Banjo 1993), and it is
likely that some form of pidgin existed.
 With continuing trade, missionary activity and political intervention, English
became more than a foreign language in the coastal region. Many of the
intermediaries were West Indians and others from the African diaspora.
 Late in the nineteenth century, rivalry among European
powers led to a ‘scramble for Africa’ and the Congress of
Berlin in 1884–5 ratified the division of the continent into
zones belonging to seven European powers. One by one
nearly all the states in Africa were conquered by military
expeditions and incorporated into European colonial
structures, among them the Afrikaner states in South
Africa. After some adjustments the countries listed in
5.4.1 came under various forms of British control
 In all the ex-British colonies throughout Africa English remains the main
language of education, administration and business, although it is not always
the link language, communication between ethnic groups.
 In Kenya, Uganda and Tanzania, Swahili has a strong position, but history has meant that each country has a
different policy towards it – the language is dominant in Tanzania and least used in Uganda

 In Zambia and Zimbabwe English is very dominant and local languages have little or no public role, though
they are of course very widely used.

 Since the 1950s, Africa has produced a large literature in English, honoured in the 1986 Nobel Prize for Wole
Soyinka and in the international success of novels by Chinua Achebe and others. Kenyan literature in both
Swahili and English flourishes, but literature in English by Africans is not uncontroversial in South Africa the
government has launched an extremely ambitious language rights policy.

 The media in anglophone Africa use a mixture of English and local languages, and in terms of music and
radio particularly the local languages may be the more popular and more listened to. English is the
predominant written language in most of Anglophone Africa and the main language even of conversational
writing useful comparison can be made between Zambia and Malawi. In Zambia, English is the only potential
link language and is the medium of education even at primary school, so that Zambian children normally do
not learn to read their mother tongue.
 If education is offered in the language of the colonisers it alienates
the local educated from their own community and creates an elite.
But if education is offered in the vernacular, the colonised people
suspect an attempt to keep knowledge from them and provide second
class service.
 In Zambia, English is the only potential link language and is the
medium of education even at primary school, so that Zambian
children normally do not learn to read their mother tongue.
Some features
 The accents of individual African speakers depend on their mother tongue, the area they grew up in,
and how acrolectally they are speaking.
 The syntax of written standard African English is close to that of other Standard varieties.
 We saw that South Asian English was characterised by frequent code mixing, in the sense that words
from Hindi and Urdu can be quite freely used in English, because the writer or speaker can rely on
the reader or listener being bilingual.
 In Kenya and Tanzania speakers can assume that the interlocutor knows Swahili, ‘Practically any
local word can turn up in East African English
 Pragmatics: Behaviour and discourse patterns are transferred direct from one’s own culture and
therefore will be very different across Africa.