Colloquial Singapore English is an outer circle variety that exhibits contact induced linguistic change. It has been characterized as the L variant in diglossic opposition to standard English. In this paper, the authors address two related issues: (1) the extent to which the Singapore English diglossia is supported by corpus data, and (2) the…

Describes the use of English in literature written by nonnative speakers. These "new-English" authors present new elements and structures within a matrix of internationally "standard" English. Various pragmatic dimensions of creativity in selected works by such authors are described. (Author/LMO)

Describes the lexical characteristics of South African Indian English, focusing on its similarities with English in India, pidgins and creoles, and other expatriate Indian Englishes. (Author/CB)

An examination of linguists' attempts to characterize the variety of English used in various articles and novels found that, although they used different criteria for classification, the linguists almost equally (about 30 percent of the time each) either could not identify, correctly identified, or incorrectly identified the variety. (14…

The spread of English has increased opportunities for native English speakers in the United States to interact with speakers of other Englishes (WE). These native speakers are rarely encouraged to develop the knowledge and skills necessary for intercultural communication, often resulting in a one-way communicative burden on the world English…

Offers insight into English in the multilingual nation of South Africa at the turn of the new millennium. Describes the social history of English in South Africa to provide the background against which this special issue of this journal came about. Highlights features of each of the articles included in the issue. (Author/VWL)

Investigates the extent to which users of Black South African English (BSAE) command the vowel system of English. One mother tongue speaker each of English, Southern Sotho, and Zulu read a set of stimulus words representing various monothong contrasts in standard South African English. Results are discussed in relation to the question of whether…

Attempts to show that the move to stem the popularity of Singlish (Singapore English) is another manifestation of the notion of creative destruction, currently being proposed as a strategy to improve partial destruction of existing economic ideas and structures that rapidly obsolesce with the emergence of new ones. Argues that attempts to replace…

Variation in the past-tense model of the verb "be" is widespread amongst English dialects, and is often considered to be the result of analogical levelling. Through an analysis of non-standard "was" in buckie English, a variety spoken in a small fishing town in northeast Scotland, this article shows that the historical record…

Demonstrates the specific ways in which the influence of Chinese manifests itself in the structure of the noun phrases containing relative-clause modifiers in colloquial Singapore English. Argues that while previous researchers have been correct in pointing out the substratal influence of Chinese, they have not gone far enough in articulating the…

This paper presents a practical research guide to world English, with particular emphasis on comparative studies of varieties of English. Part I is a select bibliography of journal articles, books, and book chapters relating to comparative studies of English dating from 1992 to 2002. Part II lists the journals included in Part I, and includes…

The large-scale ongoing migration of Anglophone Caribbean natives to North America, particularly to New York City, in the last two decades, has brought an influx of Caribbean English (CE)-speaking students into US and Canadian schools and colleges. This article discusses the extent to which such students, who publicly identify themselves as native…

Focuses on the fiction written by Pacific Islanders, which emerged around 1970 and began to overwrite the perspectives and stereotypes that had characterized colonial narratives set in the Pacific written prior to that times. Pacific Islanders adapted the Standard English code to create a new English with which to express their own cultures and…

Discusses the International Corpus of English project for compiling machine-readable corpora of English for several countries, exploring the use of such corpora for modern grammars and dictionaries in general, applied, and theoretical research on nonnative varieties of English, sociolinguistic dimensions, and multidimensional approaches to…

International English, a variety of English capable of meeting the primary communicative needs of a large and growing number of people who use English for international purposes, is described. The content, domains of use, communicative functions, discourse and linguistic features, and teaching and learning situation of International English are…