The interplay of the national, regional, and global in standards of English

Abstract

An accent recognition survey was designed and distributed among respondents from the anglophone Caribbean with the aim of finding out whether they can recognize different standard accents of English as spoken by newscasters from five Caribbean countries, namely Jamaica, St Kitts and Nevis, Dominica, St Vincent and the Grenadines, and Trinidad and Tobago. The results revealed that there is a general difficulty in placing Caribbean newscaster accents in the correct country. The only exception was a Trinidadian accent that was recognized in 60 per cent of all cases. The results suggest that in the context of newscaster accents, recognizable national standard varieties are the exception. This paper also introduces the idea that to some extent, standard accents of English in the Caribbean might be recognizable on a subregional level.

The Trini Sing-Song: Sociophonetic variation in Trinidadian English prosody and differences to other varieties

“…Studies of spoken language use have mostly been concerned with variation at the morphosyntactic (e.g., Deuber, 2014 ; Mair, 2009 ) and segmental phonological level (e.g., Ahlers & Meer, 2019 ; Irvine-Sobers, 2018 ; Kraus, 2017 ; Leung, 2013 ; Rosenfelder, 2009 ) and provided consistent evidence of distinct (often Creole-influenced) features and local innovations, especially at the phonological level, and an increasing reliance on these endocentric forms of English. Nevertheless, accents of standard English in the region are also often characterized by some degree of exonormative influence: while American and British influences have a prominent role in some domains, such as radio newscasting across different Caribbean islands ( Deuber & Leung, 2013 ; Hänsel & Deuber, 2019 ; Hänsel, 2021 ; Westphal, 2017 ), these influences seem to be smaller on a more general level and standard British English mostly tends to be the somewhat stronger exonormative force (see Leung, 2013 on Trinidad; Rosenfelder, 2009 on Jamaica). 2…”

“… 2. A notable exception is spoken English in the Bahamas, which is more influenced by American English due to the country’s long-lasting ties with the American mainland (Kraus, 2017). Little systematic research exists on accent variation in English in the smaller Caribbean countries and potential influences from British and American English outside the domain of radio newscasting (Hänsel & Deuber, 2019; Hänsel, 2021. ). …”

Posthumanism and the role of orality and literacy in language ideologies in Belize

“…In addition, the affordances of digital writing may destabilize the norms of the age of literacy (Androutsopoulos, 1998). Taken together, discursive complexity that involves the continuing transnational prestige of exogenous norms of (different kinds of) English and the important functions of Kriol as index of local, non‐Western, non‐standardized culture make it unlikely that there will be one national prestige form of language in Caribbean settings (for empirical observations on the variability of standard forms in the Caribbean, see Hänsel & Deuber, 2019).…”

“…The study of attitudes towards standardized Englishes in Caribbean settings is a newer phenomenon (Deuber & Leung, 2013; Hackert, 2016; Mühleisen, 2001; Wilson, 2017), which is interested in the emergence of endonormative standards of English and in the attitudes towards them (see Meer et al., 2019 on Trinidad or Perez & Schmalz, 2021 on St. Kitts;). It is noticeable that influences from local, national and transnational spaces seem to intermingle in these settings, leading to indications of national norms in some settings (potentially in Trinidad; see Hänsel & Deuber, 2019; Wilson, 2017) but also to a lack of clear conceptions of Caribbean varieties as indices of nationality and to possible simultaneous attributions of value to British, US as well as Caribbean features (Hackert et al., 2020; Mair, 2017, section 3; Meer & Deuber, 2020).…”

Introduction: Englishes of the Caribbean

“…Apart from a recent movement to record lesser‐known varieties of English (Schreier et al., 2010; Williams et al., 2015), a strong focus has so far been laid on the larger and more populous islands, especially Jamaica, Trinidad, and the Bahamas. Little systematic empirical research exists on dialectological, sociolinguistic, and language attitudinal aspects in the smaller islands of the Eastern Caribbean, such as Dominica, Grenada, or St. Kitts, especially when it comes to standardized varieties of English (but see Deuber et al., 2021; Hänsel & Deuber, 2019; Hänsel, 2021; Hänsel et al., 2022; Perez & Schmalz, 2021; Schmalz, 2023 fc. ; Walker & Meyerhoff, 2020 for recent exceptions).…”