India is the world’s most populous country and a hub of linguistic diversity. Within this diverse country, India’s Northeast is a region that is historically, geographically, religiously, and linguistically more distinct from the rest of India than probably any other region, but it has received scant attention from academic research. As a locus of contact and exchange between South Asia, Southeast Asia, and East Asia, it is one of the linguistically most diverse regions in the world. Many of its states lack a single local majority language, potentially contributing to the more widespread use of English as a lingua franca in these states. We examine both the general linguistic diversity and the knowledge of English in the Northeast using the latest Census data (2011). We borrow the concepts of alpha and gamma diversity and the measure of diversity Simpson’s D from the study of ecology and apply them to the analysis of linguistic ecology, confirming that the population of Northeast India is characterized by a greater diversity of local languages than the remainder of India; we also find that knowledge of English is more widespread in four of eight states. Furthermore, we examine the potential for Assamese, Hindi, and English to all serve as local linguae francae and discuss the limitations of Census data as a source, ending with proposals of methods with the potential to contribute to a more comprehensive understanding of the role of English in the linguistic ecology of the Northeast.

This chapter critically discusses recent research on speech rhythm in native, learner and second language varieties of English. Impressionistic descriptions have often claimed that Second Language or ‘Outer Circle’ varieties of English are syllable-timed, in contrast to the stress-timed rhythm of Native or ‘Inner Circle’ varieties of English. With a view to the reconceptualisation of speech rhythm as a continuum between stress- and syllable-timing, this claim can be rephrased as Second Language (or Outer Circle) varieties of English being more syllable-timed than Native (or Inner Circle) varieties of English. In a synthesis of recent empirical research, results from 18 studies are compared. Overall, the claim of a tendency towards syllable-timing can be confirmed not only for Outer Circle Englishes, but also, more tentatively, for Learner or ‘Expanding Circle’ varieties of English. However, several caveats are needed to qualify these conclusions, relating to the selection of varieties of English studied by recent research and the methodologies employed in the field. The chapter concludes with a discussion of how the subsequent chapters in the volume contribute towards addressing these concerns and thus advance the study of speech rhythm in native, learner and second language varieties of English.

While rhythm metrics have been widely used to quantify speech rhythm, direct evidence of their perceptual validity is currently very limited. If it were to be shown that particular rhythm metrics reflect, at least to some degree, listeners' perception of speech rhythm, this would substantially enhance the case for their use as accurate quantifications of speech rhythm. To this end, this chapter presents the results of a perception study harnessing listeners' ability to conduct pairwise comparisons of the regularity of utterances. 22 speakers of Indian English rated all 55 pairwise comparisons of 11 intonation phrases for regularity. A Multidimensional Scaling analysis reveals that 74% of the variation in the responses is accounted for by two dimensions, which are in turn explained in regression analyses by the speech rate normalised rhythm metrics nPVI-V, VarcoV and VarcoC (all with final intervals removed). In addition, speech rate was also relevant as a separate independent variable. The results of the present perception study partially converge with previous evidence from production studies concerning which rhythm metrics are reliable and are likely to at least partially account for listeners' perception of rhythmicity.

Varieties of English in the Caribbean have been claimed to have characteristic pitch patterns. However, there is little empirical research on prosodic aspects of English in the region. This paper provides a comparative phonetic analysis of several pitch parameters (pitch level, range, dynamism, rate of change, variability in rate of change, and tone rate) in English language data from Dominica, Grenada, and Trinidad that comprises read and spontaneous speech from 243 speakers. The results show that a wide pitch range and a high degree of variability in pitch, as mentioned in previous works, are not necessarily characteristic of English in the Caribbean overall, but that there are considerable cross-territorial prosodic differences, with English in Trinidad showing more variability than in Dominica and Grenada, particularly among female speakers. Socioprosodic variation, largely specific to Trinidad, was also identified.

Abstract Most New Englishes are classified as syllable-timed and many L1 varieties of English as stress-timed. However, much empirical work on varieties of English and other languages has shown that a categorical distinction between discrete rhythm classes is not commensurate with the empirical evidence. Moreover, the comparability of published research is hampered by a lack of methodological standardization. This chapter provides a step-by-step guide for researchers and charts new avenues for future enquiries, illustrated with a case study comparing Pakistani, Nigerian, Philippine, and British English. Results indicate that the first three can be described as more syllable-timed than British English, but also that a binary classification of syllable- vs. stress-timed does not fully do justice to the results.

Most New Englishes are classified as syllable-timed and many L1 varieties of English as stress-timed. However, much empirical work on varieties of English and other languages has shown that a categorical distinction between discrete rhythm classes is not commensurate with the empirical evidence. Moreover, the comparability of published research is hampered by a lack of methodological standardization. This chapter provides a step-by-step guide for researchers and charts new avenues for future enquiries, illustrated with a case study comparing Pakistani, Nigerian, Philippine, and British English. Results indicate that the first three can be described as more syllable-timed than British English, but also that a binary classification of syllable- vs. stress-timed does not fully do justice to the results.

The current study provides a phonetic perspective on the questions of whether a high degree of variability in pitch may be considered a characteristic, endonormative feature of Trinidadian English (TrinE) at the level of speech production and contribute to what is popularly described as 'sing-song' prosody. Based on read and spontaneous data from 111 speakers, we analyze pitch level, range, and dynamism in TrinE in comparison to Southern Standard British (BrE) and Educated Indian English (IndE) and investigate sociophonetic variation in TrinE prosody with a view to these global F0 parameters. Our findings suggest that a large pitch range could potentially be considered an endonormative feature of TrinE that distinguishes it from other varieties (BrE and IndE), at least in spontaneous speech. More importantly, however, it is shown that a high degree of pitch variation in terms of range and dynamism is not as much characteristic of TrinE as a whole as it is of female Trinidadian speakers. An important finding of this study is that pitch variation patterns are not homogenous in TrinE, but systematically sociolinguistically conditioned across gender, age, and ethnic groups, and rural and urban speakers. The findings thus reveal that there is a considerable degree of systematic local differentiation in TrinE prosody. On a more general level, the findings may be taken to indicate that endonormative tendencies and sociolinguistic differentiation in TrinE prosody are interlinked.

The spread of the progressive from dynamic to stative verbs started in the seventeenth century, and slowed down in the late twentieth century. The present study investigates recent change in the use of stative progressives in conversational British English from the early 1990s to the early 2010s. The analysis focuses on a total of 100 stative verb lemmata in the spoken, demographic sections of the original and new British National Corpus, restricted to a variable context where a progressive could potentially occur. Results indicate that overall, stative progressives have not become more frequent in the last twenty years, and that the group of stative verbs is highly heterogeneous. However, particular verbs, such as expect and think, do indeed combine more frequently with the progressive now, which could be the cause of the popular impression of the continuing spread of stative progressives. In addition to a frequency-based analysis, a distinctive collexeme analysis offers a more fine-grained analysis of the collostructional preferences of individual verb lemmata and semantic classes of stative verbs. This analysis reveals that the stative verbs are heterogenous and that the lemmata most distinctly associated with the progressive belong to the group of stance verbs.

Abstract The present study investigates rhotics in Standard Scottish English (SSE). Drawing on an auditory analysis of formal speeches given in the Scottish parliament by 49 speakers (members of parliament and the general public), it examines whether an underlying rhotic standard exists for SSE speakers from all over Scotland, whether and where rhotics are realized as trills/taps or approximants, and what factors influence variation in the realization and distribution of rhotics. The results show that SSE is variably rhotic, with 54% of all non-linking coda /r/ realized, and that trills/taps are more frequent in intervocalic (onset and linking coda) position. The findings contradict the idea of SSE being generally rhotic but rather confirm previous reports of increasing occurrence of non-rhoticity, not just by specific speaker groups, but also in a formal context. They further show that variation in rhotics in SSE foremost tends to be affected by language-internal than language-external factors.

Research on gender differences in language use previously focused mainly on affluent, especially Western societies. The present chapter extends this research to acrolectal Indian English, a postcolonial variety of English, investigating how the use of intensifiers (e.g. very, really) is affected not only by the speakers’ gender, but also their age, the gender of the other speakers in the conversation and the formality of the context. Results show some parallels with Western varieties of English, in particular a tendency for women to use more intensifiers than men in informal contexts. However, Indian women modify their usage of intensifiers with respect to the formality of the context more than British women and men, while Indian men do so less than British women and men. In mixed-sex conversations, Indian women also converge with Indian men in their intensifier usage, while neither British women nor men do so. The more flexible use of intensifiers by Indian women may be a response to societal expectations regarding their linguistic behaviour, in order to avoid censure by society. British women likewise continue to be affected by such constraints, but much less so, while the linguistic behaviour of Indian and British men is subject to less criticism.

Both influence of language learners’ L1 (“transfer”) and universal mechanisms have been forwarded as important determinants in Second Language Acquisition. This study weighs these claims against each other through a case study on temporal expression, looking at the alternation between the Present Perfect and the Simple Past in L2 English. It analyzes written and spoken data from two learner samples, one with a similar structure in the L1 (German), the other one (Cantonese) lacking such a structure, and compares them against native data, using a multifactorial regression-based approach. The results suggest higher error rates of Cantonese-speaking learners, so that target-like use of past-referring time-reference forms is mediated by L1 influence. By contrast, L1 influence is not traceable when the distributions of usage contexts and error conditioning are compared across the learner samples and with the native baseline data, suggesting a prevalence of universal mechanisms conspiring with linguistic factors.

Less than three decades after the launch of theInternational Corpus of Englishproject, corpus-based research on world Englishes has enjoyed continued success. A wide variety of corpora and databases are now available to researchers, which allow for the exploration of very large datasets of varieties of English all over the globe, including historical data, as found in diachronic corpora that have recently been released for varieties other than British or American English (for example, Australian, Ghanaian, Indian, Philippine, or Singapore Englishes). Research in the field has also been enriched by the emergence of new models of analysis of world Englishes (beyond the Three Circles and the dynamic model), which take into account the social dynamics of the 21st century, such as mobility, globalization and Americanization. The papers in this special issue set out to make a contribution to our understanding of general patterns of language change, and reveal how major theoretical explanations of language variation and change are better understood through the broad lens of corpus-based research on world Englishes.