Varieties of English in Writing

Migge, Bettina; Muehleisen, Susanne

doi:10.1075/veaw.g41

Cited by 31 publications

(1 citation statement)

References 43 publications

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“…Blogging bears some comparison with the register of letter-writing, although it is probably less stylized than the letters collected in historical corpora such as ARCHER (A Representative Corpus of Historical English Registers) and the Australian COOEE (Corpus of Early Oz English) (Fritz 2007). The extent to which writing represents the speaking voice is problematic, as discussed by Hickey (2010) in his introduction to research on varieties of English in writing. Written language reflects the author's communicative intent rather than spontaneous narrative, and the audience constructed through it is always a fiction (Ong 1975).…”

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confidence: 96%

Response to Davies and Fuchs

Peters

2015

EWW

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The Global Web-based English Corpus (GloWbE) introduced to EWW readers in Davies and Fuchs's focus article is an outstanding addition to the corpora of the English-speaking/English-using world -by its sheer size and up-to-dateness, and especially its inclusion of 14 "new Englishes" and six "core Englishes" (i.e. both indigenized and settler varieties, in Schneider's (2007) terminology). 1 Its 1.9 billion words come from 340,000 websites and blogs with the relevant regional suffixes, which were also carefully checked for other indicators of regionality. The validity of using internet data to represent regional varieties of English has been demonstrated by Cook and Hirst (2012), in relation to Canadian and British English, and the new GloWbE corpus takes this a quantum leap further. It will be an invaluable reference resource for mapping new varieties of English whose norms are still evolving (Hundt and Gut 2012).GloWbE's concentration on web-based discourse serves a number of purposes. It creates a repository of an English-language medium not represented in any of the existing standard corpora (Corpus of Contemporary American English, COCA; British National Corpus, BNC). It provides a vast body of English language data from the second decade of the 21st century. Because this web-based material consists largely of unrestricted websites and blogs, it is not entangled by the copyright law (Androutsopoulos 2014) operative in some English-speaking countries, and GloWbE makes it freely available to bona fide researchers. This includes researchers outside linguistics, e.g. psychologists and speech pathologists seeking English norms for literacy and language competence. The Brown Corpus from the 1960s has too long served as the benchmark for assessment and diagnostic purposes (Brysbaert and New 2009), apart from its limitations in terms of the medium/genres it represents (published writing only).The GloWbE corpus consists of blogs (60 per cent) and websites (40 per cent), housing a mix of internet genres and text-types. In fact, both source types contain a mix of material, since the blogs written by individuals may contain or link to texts from institutional websites elsewhere. Blogs would nevertheless contain more material which has not undergone professional editing, and thus reflect the less generically constrained frontiers of the local variety. Meanwhile websites managed by institutions naturally contain more professionally edited material, 1. Davies and Fuchs's term "core" Englishes reflects Kachru's (1985) three-circles model of World English, though not his terminology ("inner circle" Englishes).

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confidence: 96%

Response to Davies and Fuchs

Peters

2015

EWW

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Investigating Historical Variation and Change in Written Documents

Schneider¹

2013

The Handbook of Language Variation and Change

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Scots

McClure

2017

The Encyclopedia of Medieval Literature in Britain

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Scots, descended from the Northumbrian dialect of Old English, became the language of court and government in Scotland during the Stewart period (1371–1603). Though not at first recognized as a distinct language from metropolitan English, it came to be so regarded in the course of this period, as a result of both the increasing linguistic divergence between the two forms and the imposing achievements in Scots poetry and prose. With the introduction of printing, however, the written language was gradually assimilated to metropolitan English norms, and the loss of a royal court in 1603 deprived the kingdom of a focus of literary activity. Despite those setbacks, Scots has remained alive as both a spoken and a literary language, and in the modern period more enlightened attitudes to it in the educational field may contribute to its preservation.

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Varieties of English in Writing

Cited by 31 publications

References 43 publications

Response to Davies and Fuchs

Response to Davies and Fuchs

Investigating Historical Variation and Change in Written Documents

Scots

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