Stell Namibian English in Its Multilingual Environment

1. Auflage 2025
ISBN: 978-3-11-078440-4
Verlag: De Gruyter
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, 434 Seiten

Reihe: ISSN

Already much discussed within the World Englishes research paradigm, English in Namibia only began to develop into a dominant lingua franca from 1990 onwards. The study’s central research questions are: How does spoken English vary in Namibia? Does it form one variety or several? And what is distinctly Namibian about it? To answer these questions, this study draws on perceptually contextualized speech data collected among young urban Namibian generations. It first identifies the historical and contemporary uses of English in Namibia in comparison with other languages. The patterns of code-switching into which Namibian English is embedded are illustrated based on a corpus of informal multilingual Namibian speech. The study then zooms in on its phonetic and grammatical features, with particular emphasis on how these features are perceived and socially distributed, and whether they represent transfers from native languages or imports from exogenous English varieties.

Zielgruppe

Scholars and Researchers interested in Sociolinguistics, Language

Autoren/Hrsg.

Stell, Gerald

Fachgebiete

• Geisteswissenschaften Sprachwissenschaft Soziolinguistik
• Geisteswissenschaften Sprachwissenschaft Mehrsprachigkeit

Leseproben

Introduction

1 World Englishes and second-language varieties of English

As transatlantic cultural ties between the New World and the Old one began to fade in the 18th and 19th centuries, the notion started to emerge that new language varieties are likely to arise through geographic isolation from the former colonial centres. The blossoming of Creole studies from the late 1960s onwards, whose object is new varieties that emerged in plantation societies demographically dominated by enslaved or indentured Afro-descendants, drew some scholarly attention away from language varieties like American English, which developed in former settlement colonies, where European populations formed demographic majorities. The post-WWII wave of African and Asian independences shifted focus to emergent second-language varieties (“L2”) of the former colonial languages, that is, language varieties transmitted in schools rather than at home. The theoretical angle taken on postcolonial L2 Englishes – on which a vast body of literature was produced – was initially shaped by concepts from Second Language Acquisition (“SLA”) research. One of these is the notion of “interference” from native or first languages (“L1”), which Quirk et al. (1972) had in mind when labelling postcolonial L2 Englishes as “interference varieties”, implying that these Englishes are flawed due to infelicitous analogies with their speakers’ L1s. Following this logic, only British English and US English could be considered normative, a view most explicitly articulated in Quirk (1990).

Criticized as “linguistic imperialism” (Philippson 1992), the normative ideology articulated by Quirk (1990) did not always sit well with the emergent academic elites in newly independent countries that retained English as an official language (see also Mesthrie and Bhatt 2008). Kachru, an Indian scholar, is credited with pioneering a systematic challenge to the normative prevalence of L1 Englishes. Kachru’s Three Circles Model (1982) provided a sociolinguistic framework that expanded on earlier proposals dating from the 1970s to distinguish between sorts of Englishes. Unlike Quirk et al. (1972), who primarily distinguished between L1 and L2 Englishes, Kachru further subdivided L2 Englishes into ESLs (English as a Second Language) and EFLs (English as a Foreign Language). According to Kachru, ESLs develop within the Outer Circle, which encompasses all ex-British and US colonies that do not historically constitute European settlement colonies. The Outer Circle is distinct from the Inner Circle, where L1 Englishes (referred to as ENLs or English as a Native Language) are predominant. The Inner Circle includes countries such as the United Kingdom, Ireland, the United States, New Zealand, Australia, as well as Canada’s and South Africa’s L1 English-speaking populations. Finally, Kachru differentiated the Outer Circle from the Expanding Circle, which comprises countries without historical ties to the United Kingdom or the United States and where English functions primarily as a foreign language.

ESLs differ most noticeably from EFLs in terms of their societal status. ESLs enjoy high prestige at the local level by maintaining a strong (if not exclusive) association with government institutions and education. As a result, they are socio-economically ranked above local indigenous languages, which often lack institutional visibility. In contrast, in the Expanding Circle, indigenous languages typically retain dominance in high-status contexts. The diglossic situations typical of the Outer Circle mean that English co-exists with indigenous languages across a wide range of contexts. Consequently, English in the Outer Circle is not learned only within the confines of classrooms, unlike in the Expanding Circle, where its use is largely restricted to formal educational settings. Another property of ESLs that distinguishes them from EFLs is their capacity to develop “endonormative” tendencies. While EFLs retain exonormative orientations – striving to conform to British English or US English – ESLs often develop their own norms, diverging from colonial centres as part of a process of “indigenization”. More concretely, a “norm-developing” English variety is one that adopts locally specific linguistic features into its high registers, such as lexical items adapted to reflect local contexts and customs. For example, it has become acceptable in formal written Indian English, which Kachru often cited to exemplify “norm-developing” English varieties, to use the Sanskrit numerals lakh (one hundred thousand) and crore (ten million) instead of their British English equivalents to reflect the Indic numbering system, which remains in official use in India.

Kachru’s model significantly contributed to legitimizing Outer Circle Englishes as viable alternatives to British or US English. It laid the groundwork for the “World Englishes paradigm”, a multidisciplinary field dedicated to the study of all varieties of English world-wide. The term “World English” was introduced with the aim of abolishing the distinction between L1 and L2 Englishes (Kachru 1992: 2). Kachru’s enthusiasm for dissolving notional boundaries between ENL and ESL soon inspired scholars to question the relevance of even distinguishing between ESL and EFL. This sparked a still ongoing debate, initially spearheaded by Sridhar and Sridhar (1986) and their influential call to bridge the “paradigm gap” between SLA research and studies on ESLs. Empirical evidence has contributed to this debate. Some corpus studies, such as Hundt and Vogel’s (2011) analysis of progressive forms across ENL, ESL, and EFL varieties, suggest that the distinctions between these categories are more gradual than categorical. However, more holistic studies, such as Szmrecsanyi and Kortmann (2011), identify significant typological differences between ESL and EFL grammars, which they argue justify maintaining the conceptual distinction between the two.

More a holistic critical perspective on “colonial” thinking about the English language than a formal theoretical framework, the World Englishes paradigm does not provide a specific methodology for describing the linguistic features of L2 Englishes (Bolton 2006; see also Saraceni 2021). Nevertheless, there has been a notable increase in linguistic studies that use Kachruvian terminology. A common approach in these studies is to use political borders as the basis for spatially delineating English varieties, assigning them labels such as “Ghanaian English”, “Kenyan English”, or “Malaysian English”. These studies frequently rely on corpora such as the International Corpus of English (ICE), whose Outer Circle components predominantly consist of written data or formal speech data. In other words, they focus on the local “standard” variety rather than on the vernacular forms of English, which are often conversationally mixed with other languages – a typical feature of multilingual Outer Circle contexts (Kirk and Nelson 2018). As a result, the empirical foundation of these studies does not adequately capture how English is spoken or how it varies in everyday local contexts.

Within the World Englishes paradigm, research questions on Outer Circle Englishes often centre on the validity of the boundaries that Kachru drew between these Englishes and others. For instance: Do Englishes in the Outer Circle emerge in the same way as colonial Englishes in the Inner Circle? Is the degree of difference between Outer Circle Englishes and Expanding Circle Englishes determined by which sort of societal contexts are compared across circles? Answering such questions often requires a comparative approach, with the ICE serving as a key data source. Alternatively, it necessitates the creation of corpora that span Kachru’s circles. Beyond the comparative approach, other methodologies focus on describing the internal dynamics of a specific English variety: How many distinct local varieties of English exist within a given geographic area and which holds the highest prestige? To what extent are these varieties converging into a supra-regional or supra-ethnic variety, and what factors drive this process? What insights does variation within a given English variety offer into the social distinctions among its speakers? These are the central research questions that this book aims to address, particularly in the context of Namibian English. The next two sections introduce two sociolinguistic models associated with the study of (post)colonial Englishes, each offering distinctive approaches to these questions.

2 Modelling (post)colonial Englishes: Trudgill (2004)

Trudgill (2004) proposed the first empirically based model for understanding the emergence of English varieties in colonial contexts, more specifically the L1 Englishes spoken in Britain’s former settlement colonies in the Southern Hemisphere. Trudgill’s model is theoretically grounded in social dialectology, while also incorporating concepts from social psychology, particularly the idea of accommodation. This concept is closely tied to face-to-face interaction, which Trudgill (2004) highlights as a key context for new-dialect formation. Based primarily on recorded speech data from individuals born in colonial New Zealand, Trudgill’s model identifies three sociolinguistic stages of new-dialect formation. These stages are...

Über Autor(innen)

Gerald Stell, The University of Lausanne, Switzerland.