World Non-Standard Englishes Chapter 4

"Cyber-Jamaican" (Mair 2011): a vernacular on the web - written JamE: limited contact in an essentially diglossic situation; severely constrained codeswitching - spoken JamE: intensive contact in a Creole-English continuum; focus on the upper-mesolectal range - diasporic and "post-native" varieties; crossing - JamE in computer-mediated communication?  toward a sociolinguistic ethnography of www.jamaicans.com CCJ: The Corpus of Cyber-Jamaican 16+ mio words from JamEng/ JC from www.jamaicans.com Year Number of words 2000 354 2001 104,077 2002 697,184 2003 1,808,513 2004 1,683,851 2005 1,477,049 2006 2,127,915 2007 4,878,145 2008 3,833,655 Total 16,610,743 Mapping CCJ in geographical space Jamaican Creole on the web: being authentic without necessarily being mimetic from the acoustic to the visual vernacular in three stages … (1) [RollinCalf] Satdeh time...braps, beef soup done, seh shi neva go a college fi bwile no yam. One mawnin mi a hat up little mackrel an some pepper an shi tell mi seh mi a tink up di house. [Saturday time – and all of a sudden, the beef soup is ready, and she says she didn't go to college to cook yams. One morning, I am heating up a little mackerel and some peppers and she tells me that I am stinking up the house] (2) [Bizi_Q] so what mi can use fi clean gems, stones, diamonds, etc?? mi have de silver/gold cleaning solution but it nuh seem fi do nutten fi de stone dem..sometimes it look wussa dan when it went in. mi read up pon de net an some sites say use dish washing liquid..others say that's a big no no. what unu use clean unu stones? would it be better fimi carry it go a jeweler?? how much dat would cost? carry it go a jeweler?? how much dat would cost? [so what can I use to clean gems, stones, diamonds, etc.? I have the silver/gold cleaning solution but it does not seem to do anything for the stones … sometimes it looks worse than when it went in. I read up on the net and some sites say 'use dish washing liquid' … others say that's a big no no. What do you use to clean your stones? Would it be better for me to take it to the jeweller's?] (3) [Blugiant] oww manee peeps inn dem caribbean household versus mzungu oousehold. iff itt tekk two ar more caribbean wage earnas wukkinn more owa dan mzungu fi mekk more dan mzungu oousehold widd less peeps wat iss da artikkle seyinn bout da caribbean peeps qualitee aff life [How many people are there in those Caribbean households versus white people's households? If it takes two or more Caribbean wage earners working more hours than white people to make more than a white household with fewer people what is the article saying about the Caribbean people's quality of life?] Formal  Informal  Anti-formal Formal: “Accepted as educated; belonging or assignable to IAE; also any regionalism which is not replaceable …” Informal: “Accepted as familiar; chosen as part of usually well-structured, casual, relaxed speech, but sometimes characterized by morphological and syntactic reductions of English structure and by other remainder features of decreolization.” Anti-formal: “Deliberately rejecting Formalness; consciously familiar and intimate; part of a wide range from close and friendly through jocular to coarse and vulgar; any Creolized or Creole form or structure surviving or conveniently borrowed to suit context or situation. When such items are used an absence or a wilful closing of social distance is signalled. Such forms survive profusely in folk-proverbs and sayings, and are widely written with conjectural spellings in attempts at realistic representations of folk-speech in Caribbean literature.” (Allsopp 1996: lvii) 4. Conclusions: the galaxy of Englishes the world-language system (de Swaan 2002) • hyper-central language: English, the hub of the world language system • super-central languages: French, Hindi, Mandarin, Spanish, Turkish, Kisuaheli, … • central languages: Danish, Dutch, Finnish, Korean, … • peripheral languages: 6,000+ English, and 6,908 other languages The galaxy of Englishes • one (or two?) hyper-central varieties: the global "hub(s)" • ca. 10 super-central varieties • ca. 100 central varieties • ca. 1,000 peripheral varieties • the hub / hyper-central variety: Standard American English • super-central varieties: standard: BrE, AusE, IndE, NigE, JamE non-standard: AAVE, JamE, London domain-specific ELF uses: science, business, international law • central varieties: standard: IrE, NZE, … non-standard: US "Southern" etc. • peripheral varieties: all traditional rurally based nonstandard dialects, plus a large number of colonial varieties including pidgins and creoles Evidence - strong unidirectional currents of lexical borrowing from AmE to all other varieties, including BrE, but only trickles in reverse direction - British academic publishers following US orthographic practice - strong non-standard impact of AAVE and Caribbean English on urban African vernaculars, but weak influence in the reverse direction Tools most needed for the study of vernacular globalisation? - large web-derived corpora of (standard or nonstandard) English? - large multilingual corpora? - small but better-transcribed and annotated corpora of spontaneous interaction? - multi-modal corpora of spontaneous interaction? - more powerful statistics? - more conceptual refinement in qualitative casestudies? - more psycholinguistic and neurolinguistic experimentation? “We possess (if we use it well) a descriptive apparatus of unparalleled precision, capable of reading infinitely big features of society from infinitely small details of communicative behaviour. Our most persuasive discourse is empirical and descriptive: we are at our best when we provide theoretically grounded and sophisticated descriptions of language problems in the world. The theoretical challenges of globalization may make some scholars inclined to produce more theory than description; in my view this would mean that we thereby sacrifice some of our best and most powerful tools.” (Blommaert 2010: xiv)