"Is it" appended to questions

[Benjamin Zimmer]

On 5/14/07, Lynne Murphy <m.l.murphy at sussex.ac.uk> wrote:
> > Lynne, do you exclude everyone else when you say "Is it?" is South
> > African?  (Please ignore speakers of 'izzit' or 'innit'; they're not
> > what I'm looking for.)
>
> I can't exclude everyone else, because I don't know everyone else, but 'is
> it' is a stereotypical feature of SAfr E.  I haven't heard of it in Wales,
> but then I'm pretty far from Wales, never been to Wales, and have a very
> hard time picking out Welsh-English speakers. (The English find my
> inability to distinguish Welsh accents rather amusing.  I can tell that
> they're different, but always guess them as being something else.)
>
> I found this article:
> gandalf.aksis.uib.no/~gisle/pdf/READING.pdf
>
> Which says:
> "Moreover, invariant  tags have been found to occur in South Africa, Papua
> New Guinea, Singapore, and in  Wales (cf Kachru 1982; Platt 1982; Todd &
> Hancock 1986)."
>
> It doesn't say which invariant tag that is, though.  (The article covers
> 'innit' and 'is it'.)

See also Peter Trudgill's ADS-L post in a Sep. 2003 thread on "innit":

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http://listserv.linguistlist.org/cgi-bin/wa?A2=ind0309b&L=ads-l&P=8735
There is an enormous body of literature on the invariant tag innit in
English English, The origin appears to be in London-based
Caribbean-influenced varieties, where it seems to have served
originally as a 'translation' of Caribbean English Creole 'no?".
It is worth noticing that such invariant tags are very common in
areas where English has a history of being learnt as a second
language e.g Welsh English invariant "isn't it?"; broad South African
English "is it?"; West African English "is it?", Indian English
"isn't it?"; Singaporean English "isn't it?/ is it?"
[etc.]
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--Ben Zimmer

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