White Kenyan English

Abstract

Introduction White African English […] is relatively insignificant in East Africa today. (Schmied 2004: 919) Schmied's claim that the English spoken by the white population in East Africa is insignificant is at least correct in that up to now no linguistic studies on that variety have been carried out. Considering that over forty years after independence the number of white speakers of English in Kenya is estimated to range between 30,000 and 40,000, however, this is somewhat surprising. After South Africa, Kenya thus has one of the largest white communities on the African continent whose mother tongue is English. Due to this it seems high time for this variety to receive some linguistic attention. This paper is a first attempt at a linguistic description of the variety of English spoken by the whites in Kenya, which will be referred to as White Kenyan English (WhKE). In the following I will first give an introduction to the sociolinguistic history and current status of the variety. Since WhKE is clearly a postcolonial English, I will frame my analysis in terms of Schneider's (2007) dynamic model, which has explicitly been designed for such varieties and has already been applied to Black Kenyan English (BlKE; Schneider 2007: 189–97). In addition to this, I will explore the role of dialect contact in the emergence of WhKE by drawing on Trudgill's (2004) model of new-dialect formation.

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