This study examines newspaper writing from ten Caribbean countries as a window on the norm orientation of English in the region. English in the former British colonies of the Caribbean has been assumed to be especially prone to postcolonial linguistic Americanization, on account of not just recent global phenomena such as mass tourism and media exposure but also long-standing personal and sociocultural links. We present a quantitative investigation of variable features comparing our Caribbean results not just to American and British reference corpora but also to newspaper collections from India and Nigeria as representatives of non-Caribbean New Englishes. The amount of American features employed varies by type of feature and country. In all Caribbean corpora, they are more prevalent in the lexicon than in spelling. With regard to grammar, an orientation toward a singular norm cannot be deduced from the data. While Caribbean journalists do partake in worldwide American-led changes such as colloquialization, as evident in the occurrence of contractions or the tendency to prefer that over which, the frequencies with which they do so align neither with American English nor with British English but often resemble those found in the Indian and Nigerian corpora. Contemporary Caribbean newspaper writing, thus, neither follows traditional British norms, nor is it characterized by massive linguistic Americanization; rather, there appears to be a certain conservatism common to New Englishes generally. We discuss these results in light of new considerations on normativity in English in the 21st century.
The Norm Orientation of English in the Caribbean: A Comparative Study of Newspaper Writing from Ten Countries
Dagmar Deuber holds the Chair of Variation Linguistics at the University of Muenster. She was formerly an assistant professor at the University of Freiburg, from which she received her Ph.D. Her research interests are in the areas of varieties of English, pidgins and creoles, sociolinguistics and corpus linguistics. Her publications include monographs on Nigerian Pidgin (Battlebridge, 2005) and English in the Caribbean (Cambridge University Press, 2014). Email: deuber@uni-muenster.de
Stephanie Hackert obtained her Ph.D. from the University of Heidelberg and has taught at various German universities. She now holds a Chair of English Linguistics at the University of Munich (LMU). Her research interests center around pidgins and creoles, variationist sociolinguistics, corpus linguistics, recent grammatical change, and historical discourse analysis. Her publications include monographs on urban Bahamian Creole English (Benjamins, 2004) and the history of the English native speaker (de Gruyter, 2012). Email: st.hackert@lmu.de
Eva Canan Hänsel is a research assistant at the Chair of Variation Linguistics in the English Department at the University of Muenster. She is currently working on a Ph.D. project on Standard English in the education context of Grenada, focusing on language attitudes and accent variation. Further research interests include varieties of English with a focus on Caribbean Englishes, English in news media, as well as corpus linguistics. Email: eva.haensel@wwu.de
Alexander Laube is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of English and American Studies at the University of Munich (LMU) and is currently teaching and conducting research at the University of Regensburg. Before, he held positions at LMU where he also completed his undergraduate work. His research centers around varieties of English, pidgin and creole languages, and variationist sociolinguists, and he has co-authored a few papers on English and creole in The Bahamas. Email: alexander.laube@ur.de
Mahyar Hejrani is a student of the MA National and Transnational Studies at the University of Muenster, and holds a BA of English Language from the Ferdowsi University of Mashhad, Iran. His research interests include World Englishes, language change, variation linguistics and corpus linguistics. Email: m_hejr01@uni-muenster.de
Catherine Laliberté is a Ph.D. candidate and research assistant in English linguistics at the University of Munich (LMU). She is currently completing her dissertation on the use of English by Panamanians of West Indian descent, touching on morphosyntactic variation as well as language maintenance and shift. Her research interests include World Englishes, pidgins and creoles, corpus linguistics and language in film. Email: catherine.laliberte@anglistik.uni-muenchen.de
Dagmar Deuber, Stephanie Hackert, Eva Canan Hänsel, Alexander Laube, Mahyar Hejrani, Catherine Laliberté; The Norm Orientation of English in the Caribbean: A Comparative Study of Newspaper Writing from Ten Countries. American Speech 2021; doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/00031283-8791736
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