Syntactic variation in interactions across international Englishes

Abstract

Discussions of World Englishes mainly concentrate on the particularities of individual varieties of English spoken in the different parts of the world. There is, however, another form of World English which emerges when speakers of different international varieties interact with each other. When English is the mother tongue of neither of the speakers who use the language for communicative purposes, they employ it as a lingua franca . This paper describes the syntactic variation found in this variety of English. It presents the results of analyses of a corpus containing 22 hours of naturally occurring interactions and describes both unsystematic as well as (seemingly) systematic grammatical choices made by the speakers. The results reveal that, not unlike the processes which have previously been documented for dialect contact, interactions across international Englishes are characterised by processes of levelling and regularisation, whilst at the same time individual speakers retain the characteristics of their original varieties. Individual Englishes are further constrained by transfer processes and interlanguage patterns.

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