And is it English?

Abstract

Varieties of English defined by users (as dialects, sociolects and chronolects) and by uses (according to medium, formality, text type, etc.) have been the object of description in various places, and have of course functioned conspicuously in this journal which has the topic as part of its title. By contrast, the questions of what can be considered English, and how its outer boundaries are defined, have been asked less frequently, and not in any comprehensive way. (In EWW I have followed a pragmatic editorial course in admitting varieties which have some linguistic relationship with English and are in a contact situation/coexistence with English in the speech community discussed.) My paper looks at a few 'problem cases' among utterances, in particular at various forms of broken English and linguistic experiments, at language mix and code-switching and then turns to linguistic systems, with semi-languages, pidgins, Creoles, cants and mixed languages singled out for detailed discussion. A classification of the varieties treated obviously depends on the degree of their divergence from English, their functional range and standardization, users' attitudes and the ways how the language is acquired -four factors which can have different weight for the classification in the individual case.

‘An Eye for an Aye’: linguistic and political backlash and conformity in eighteenth-century Scots

“…Through radical restructuring under Norse influence, Scots had diverged considerably from English (Johnston, 1997), but the development of Scots is marked by a history of lexical borrowing (MacQueen, 1983). Rather than posit a sharp divide between 'Scots' and 'English', many scholars have suggested there existed a general cline from Southern English to Scots (Frank, 1994;McArthur, 1979;Aitken, 1984;Kniezsa, 1997;Gӧrlach, 1996;Kopaczyk, 2012), containing a large common core (Meurman-Solin, 1993a). Accordingly, the distinction between the two languages was by no means clear, allowing a variety of options to be available to speakers in Scotland at any one time.…”

Can Schools Dispense with Standard Language? Some Unintended Consequences of Introducing Scots in a Scottish Primary School

“…This perception that common forms are de facto assigned to English in turn leads to the perception that Scots, if at all a language, is an incomplete one, lacking in terms which for which the English must be used. In fact, linguists have often referred to Scots as a semi‐language or Halbsprache (Aitken ; Görlach ). Standard English is thus implicitly over‐valued in the process of constructing Scots as a language.…”

Disciplinarity and the study of world Englishes

“…In some cases, ambivalence towards the issue is reflected in the publishing history of a particular work: for example, it was not until the third edition of Trudgill and Hannah's International English: A Guide to the Varieties of Standard English (1994) that a section on creoles was included. Contrary views on the issue also exist however, such as Görlach's (1997: 171) contention that pidgins and creoles be considered “independent languages on all counts” and thus not part of the study of English.…”