East African Englishes

Abstract

This survey of East African English (EAfE) focuses on Kenya, Uganda, and Tanzania, which are often seen as the core of East Africa. The varieties of English used there are considered typical ESL varieties, part of the New Englishes and of Kachru's (1986) Outer Circle. The terminology depends more on ideological stance than on "linguistic facts": the "conservative" view emphasizes the common core and acknowledged "standards," the "progressive" view cherishes the diversity of actual usage and the cultural and linguistic innovations. This presentation tries to abstract from some well-known linguistic facts and to leave the interpretations to the readers, their languagepolitical preferences, and attitudes (cf. Chapter 35, this volume).Kenya, Uganda, and Tanzania share a long, common "Anglophone" background, despite some interesting differences in colonial heritage. They are also characterized by a complex pattern of African first languages (mainly from the Bantu and Nilo-Saharan language families), a common lingua franca (Kiswahili), and a combination of Christian, Islamic and native African religious and cultural beliefs. The East African Community (1967-76, revived in 1997) is a sociopolitical expression of this common heritage.The neighboring countries in the north -Sudan, Ethiopia, and Somaliahave also experienced some English influences, but they have had their own special histories as well as linguistic and cultural traditions, especially a much more independent development and -in large parts -a more dominant Arabic influence, so that they are usually not considered ESL nations in Kachru's sense. The southern "Anglophone" neighbors -Zambia, Malawi, and Zimbabweare often (cf. Schmied, 1996) considered as "Central Africa" or even part of "Southern Africa" since they have been under a dominant impact from the south (including its native speakers of English) for over a century. This influence is engrained in the pronunciation (e.g., the long central vowel tending towards [a.], like girl as [ga.l]) and the lexicon (e.g., the typical SAfE robot for traffic light).

Countability in world Englishes

“…Ahulu (: 19–20), in a paper focusing on number marking on nouns and in verbal concord, highlights countability as ‘the most notable and regularly cited’ among ‘major area[s] of divergence between British Standard English and the English written in postcolonial countries’. Schmied (: 198) claims that ‘East African usage basically ignores the grammatical distinction of count vs. non‐count nouns [. ]’ Kachru and Smith (: 106) refer to ‘the extensive use of collective nouns as countable in almost all OC varieties’.…”

“…Schmied (: 198) echoes this observation, stating that the grammatical distinction ‘does not always correspond to the semantic distinction’ and that ‘in [IC Englishes] some non‐countables may occur in the plural in special meanings (e.g. works )’, concluding that ‘thus differences are often a question of interpretation and frequency’.…”

A preliminary description of Ugandan English

“…Ugandan English, also sometimes known as ‘Uglish’ or subsumed under East African English (EAfrE), is the variety of English spoken all throughout Uganda, which has – ever since it was brought by colonialists and missionaries – undergone a steady process of lexical enrichment, morpho‐phonological and syntactic change as well as semantic and pragmatic change. Ugandan English has only been described by Fisher (), in Ssempuuma's () study and by Isingoma (), and has been mentioned by Schmied (, , , ), who subsumes it under the ‘East African Englishes’ which ‘can be distinguished clearly enough from other Englishes and thus justifiably treated as a coherent descriptive entity’ (Schmied : 189). Furthermore, scholars from the universities of MUK (Makerere University Kampala), Gulu University and the University of Bochum (Germany) are currently involved in a documentation project of Ugandan English within an International Corpus of English for corpus‐based analysis .…”

“…English is an official language in Uganda and is spoken by approximately 30 per cent of the Ugandan population in 2002 (Schmied : 192) (which would then lead to an assumed number of up to 9 million more or less fluent speakers as the population since the official census from 2002 counted 24.5 million inhabitants (Schleck : 5). This means that we can potentially assume ca.…”

Rhoticity in Chinese English: An experimental investigation on the realization of the variant (r) in an Expanding Circle variety

“…In general, varieties that are traditionally considered to be predominantly rhotic are Indian English (Wells, 1982, but see below), Pakistani English (Mahboob and Ahmar, 2004), Maltese English (Bonnici, 2010), and Philippine English (Llamzon, 1997) while other regions are considered to be mostly non-rhotic, including Hong Kong (Setter et al, 2010), Malaysia and Singapore (Deterding, 2007) in Asia, East African countries like Kenya and Tanzania (Schmied, 2006), and West African countries such as Nigeria (Gut, 2004). However, Melchers and Shaw (2003: 131) point out that there has been little agreement on whether a particular variety in the Outer Circle is rhotic or not, since the depiction of a particular English variety on the grounds of rhoticity could be sensitive to a variety of endogenous and exogenous factors, as shown by previous research.…”