In the anglophone Caribbean, tendencies of endonormative reorientation have been observed in the development of local standards of English. Situated in the school context, this study adds a language attitude perspective on the question of whether and to what extent an endonormative standard of English is emerging in the island of Trinidad. In an accent rating study, 803 secondary students were asked to evaluate the accents of Trinidadian, other anglophone Caribbean, American, and British teachers and to identify their countries of origin. The results indicate that the respondents’ norm orientation is multidimensional and includes exo- and endonormative influences: first, there is a general coexistence of different standards since no standard serves as a superordinate norm. Second, there is no clear-cut distinction between exo- and endonormative accents, but fine-grained differences in the ratings: British and American voices received slightly higher ratings than local ones, but an American-influenced Trinidadian voice was also highly appreciated. These findings provide some new perspectives for evolutionary models of World Englishes and new insights for the discussion of standards in Trinidad, the wider anglophone Caribbean, and other small postcolonial speech communities where different local and global norms interact.

This article applies the Dynamic Model and the Extra- and Intra-territorial Forces (EIF) Model to Standard English in Trinidad based on the findings of a large-scale attitude study. The results suggest that, in the educational domain in Trinidad, a multidimensional norm orientation with coexisting standards that incorporates exo- and endonormative tendencies is prevalent. The Dynamic Model is not fully able to explain the findings, but the EIF Model can account for this norm complexity. However, the assumption underlying both models that postcolonial Englishes prototypically achieve (full) endonormativity unless their development is stalled at an earlier stage or even reversed is unlikely to fully capture the norm developmental processes in Trinidad and other complex postcolonial speech communities. We therefore propose an extension of the EIF Model that, depending on the constellation, directionality, and continuity of different sets of forces, allows for multinormative stabilization as an alternative development. We also introduce translocality as an alternative theoretical framework for the conceptualization of forces and argue for a more comprehensive understanding of intra-varietal heterogeneity. An extended and modified version of the EIF Model that takes these further complexities into account can help explain the norm developments in highly complex postcolonial speech communities.

The current study provides a phonetic perspective on the questions of whether a high degree of variability in pitch may be considered a characteristic, endonormative feature of Trinidadian English (TrinE) at the level of speech production and contribute to what is popularly described as ‘sing-song’ prosody. Based on read and spontaneous data from 111 speakers, we analyze pitch level, range, and dynamism in TrinE in comparison to Southern Standard British (BrE) and Educated Indian English (IndE) and investigate sociophonetic variation in TrinE prosody with a view to these global F0 parameters. Our findings suggest that a large pitch range could potentially be considered an endonormative feature of TrinE that distinguishes it from other varieties (BrE and IndE), at least in spontaneous speech. More importantly, however, it is shown that a high degree of pitch variation in terms of range and dynamism is not as much characteristic of TrinE as a whole as it is of female Trinidadian speakers. An important finding of this study is that pitch variation patterns are not homogenous in TrinE, but systematically sociolinguistically conditioned across gender, age, and ethnic groups, and rural and urban speakers. The findings thus reveal that there is a considerable degree of systematic local differentiation in TrinE prosody. On a more general level, the findings may be taken to indicate that endonormative tendencies and sociolinguistic differentiation in TrinE prosody are interlinked.

The retraction of /s/, particularly in /str/ clusters, toward [ʃ] has been investigated in British, Australian, and American English and shown to be conditioned phonetically and sociolinguistically. To date, however, no research exists on the retraction of /s/ in New Englishes, the nativized Englishes spoken in postcolonial territories like the Caribbean. We take up this research gap and present the results of a large-scale comparative acoustic analysis of /s/-retraction in Trinidadian English (TrinE) and American English (AmE), using Center of Gravity measurements of more than 23,500 sibilants produced by 181 speakers from two speech corpora. The results show that, in TrinE, /str/ is considerably retracted toward [ʃtɹ], while all other /sC(r)/ clusters are nonretracted and acoustically close to singleton /s/; less retracted realizations of /str/ occur across word boundaries. Although a statistically significant contrast is overall maintained between /ʃ/ and the sibilant in /str/, there is considerable overlap across many speakers. The comparison between TrinE and AmE indicates that, while sibilants in TrinE overall show acoustically lower values, both varieties have in common that retraction is limited to /str/ contexts and significantly larger in younger speakers. The degree of /str/-retraction, however, is overall larger in TrinE than AmE.

In line with international developments in applied linguistics, school curricula in Germany have begun to demand that Global Englishes be included in English Language Teaching. However, the perspectives of German school students, the main addressees of such a shift, are little explored. This article investigates the attitudes to and familiarity with different Englishes among 160 German high school students, using a mix of direct and indirect attitude elicitation methods and a nationality identification task. Informants rated (speakers of) Standard Southern British (StSBrE), Standard American (StAmE), Indian (IndE), German (GerE), and African/Kenyan English (AfrE/KenE). Multivariate analyses revealed that informants are most familiar with StSBrE and StAmE. StSBrE and, to a smaller degree, StAmE are perceived as reference norms, while English as a Second Language (ESL) varieties, especially IndE are rated negatively for competence, professionalism, and intelligibility. Familiarity with specific English as a First/Native Language varieties is linked to more positive attitudes. The observed congruence of directly and indirectly elicited attitudes suggests that changes put forth in language curricula have not influenced language attitudes (yet).