American and/or British influence on L2 Englishes – Does context tip the scale(s)?

Abstract

Abstract Taking Mair’s (2013) World System of Englishes as a starting point, this chapter seeks to investigate whether American English is a more important source of influence than British English for the other varieties of English, including English as an institutionalised second language and English as a foreign language. The study is based on twenty pairs of items that are distinctive between American and British English and whose frequency is calculated in data from the Global Web-based English Corpus (GloWbE) and the EF-Cambridge Open Language Database (EFCAMDAT). The results reveal a global influence of American English, as predicted by Mair’s model, but also show that varieties are not necessarily homogeneous in this respect and that more local contextual factors may have an impact on the degree of American and/or British influence.

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