[Corpora-List] 'Standard European English' ?

Fri Mar 3 13:58:17 UTC 2006

Hi all

My Google search on "standard european english" yielded 13 hits, but 
only 7 were relevant: (my italics and bold in the citations below)

1. http://www.thirteen.org/edonline/adulted/lessons/lesson29_activities.html
The use of idiomatic phrases is a nuance common in American English 
that often distinguishes it from Standard European English.
2. 
http://72.14.207.104/search?q=cache:KjIzv1_IM8UJ:www.gclabsite.com/eps/gc.nsf/PubWMarketing/3D243014CE07E929C1256DC1004CB05D/%24FILE/GC35_page22_24-25-26.pdf 

Please note that I am purposely avoiding any comment about 
differences between British or *standard European English*, and 
English as used in other countries such as the USA, South Africa, 
India or Australia.
3. http://forums.ubi.com/groupee/forums/a/tpc/f/808101043/m/5811012893
When I bought the game, they didn't have a patch for it. It took more 
than a year to come up with a patch for the standard European english version.
4. http://www.nuim.ie/staff/dpringle/igu/mamadouh.pdf
A realistic option would be to use and abuse the popularity of 
American English as the language of the hegemon and develop a 
European variant of international English: Standard European English? 
Continental English? Eurospeak? if dropping the reference to its 
English origins is necessary thereby facing the task of turning the 
so far pejorative term into something attractive. Whatever its name, 
this lingua franca should be clearly different from British English, 
and of course from American English.
5. 
<http://www.raycomm.com/techwhirl/archives/0411/techwhirl-0411-01030.html>http://www.raycomm.com/techwhirl/archives/0411/techwhirl-0411-01030.html
I recommend Michael Swan's _Practical English Usage_ (OUP), ISBN 0 19 
431197 x, to anyone who needs to keep up with the structure of 
standard European English.
6. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Hiberno-English
Not to mention the confusing (for Americans, at least) "Wednesday 
week"... <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Makrina>Makrina 06:47, 1 
January 2006 (UTC)
That causes no confusion for Brits - and is by no means exclusively 
an Irish usage. Pretty standard European English, I'd say. What is 
specifically Irish (I think) is "this day week" in place of "a week 
today". Or is that Scottish as well?
7. www.vsnu.nl/web/p?DOWNLOAD.annual_report_2004_english_version&id=59136
In addition to developing the Bachelor/Master system, the 
universities worked on other ways of internationalizing their 
teaching, e.g. by developing a standard European English-language 
'diploma supplement', in which the content of each graduate's course 
is to be set out in detail.

[8-13. http://dreamspire.brightdreamer.com/book/fant1.htm
I liked this story, especially because it took place in ancient 
Mesoamerican cultures.  It's nice to see something that's not 
dictated by the standard European/English medieval fantasy ideal.
The other 5 were duplicates of this last - I think non-relevant - document]

No 4 was from a paper  titled "Supranationalism in the European 
Union: what about multilingualism?", given at an academic Politics 
conference in 1998, so probably quite an early reference to this term 
- cf. there were NO examples in the 450-million Bank of English 
corpus (last updated in 2001-2002), or in the BNC-World corpus 
(http://sara.natcorp.ox.ac.uk/lookup.html).

4 of the 7 explicitly contrast "Standard European English" with 
American and other non-European varieties.

It is interesting that the users of the term seem to be non-English 
(as in England)...
Perhaps there is some antipathy to the term "British English"...

Does the term perhaps reflect:
a) a political agenda: increasingly closer political relations 
between UK and EU?
b) linguistic fact: increasing competence in English throughout EU, 
such that the distinction between "near-native" and "native" speaker 
is becoming obsolete, as the variations begin to resemble the 
regional/historical differences between English-speaker communities 
within the British Isles?

However, the paucity of hits suggests that this is an as yet 
unestablished term....

Best
Ramesh

At 11:06 03/03/2006, Adam Kilgarriff wrote:
>Yorick,
>
>your admonishments come too late.  At the Corpus Linguistics Conference in
>Birmingham last year one of the invited speakers was Anna Mauranen speaking
>on her corpus of "English as Lingua Franca" (ELF)  (cf also Carmela
>Chateau's post earlier)
>
>My sense is that there are two slightly different things going on, one being
>general the other specific.  Yes, people all over the world use English s a
>Lingua Franca but the conditions for a dialect only really apply if there is
>a set of people who communicate regularly and extensively with each other in
>it.  The one place above all others where this holds is Brussels and the
>world of the EU. So examples like Diana's performant (adj) (and I rather
>like "the responsible" often (mis?!-)spelt "the responsable") are Brussels
>English rather than ELF in general.  Many of the readers of this list are
>engaged with EU so are familiar with Brussels English.  Given the history of
>the EU and the location of Brussels, French is the biggest influence on
>Brussels English.
>
>I'd say Brussels English is a bona fide dialect, but "Standard European
>English" or "ELF" are maybe too loosely defined to have much by way of
>distinctive characteristics.
>
>Adam
>
>
>-----Original Message-----
>From: owner-corpora at lists.uib.no [mailto:owner-corpora at lists.uib.no] On
>Behalf Of Yorick Wilks
>Sent: 03 March 2006 10:27
>To: TadPiotr
>Cc: 'Lou Burnard'; corpora at lists.uib.no; 'Kate Beeching'; 'Briony Williams'
>Subject: Re: [Corpora-List] 'Standard European English' ?
>
>One version of this discussion was had a few years ago when it was
>seriously proposed---I forget who by--to create a corpus of "non-
>native English"; not a corpus of specific Englishes  from specific
>non-native groups (e.g. so as to grammar/spell correct the English of
>French speakers, for example, a useful and real task)---but rather
>some general corpus. I think the proposal collapsed under the
>ridiculousness of the idea. I do hope so and that its not out there
>somewhere waiting for users!
>YW
>
>
>On 3 Mar 2006, at 10:13, TadPiotr wrote:
>
> > I have also thought that we are an international list, using a sort of
> > international English, which  is quite similar to native English ?
> > But: I do not think that anyone suggests that a non-German using
> > his/her
> > flawed German is actually using an nternational variety of German. My
> > impression is that the number of native speakers of German (yes, I
> > know,
> > let's not talk about the varieties and dialects of German...)
> > exceeds that
> > of non-native speakers of German, while with English it is the
> > other way
> > round.
> > Tadeusz Piotrowski
> >
> >
> >> -----Original Message-----
> >> From: owner-corpora at lists.uib.no
> >> [mailto:owner-corpora at lists.uib.no] On Behalf Of Lou Burnard
> >> Sent: Friday, March 03, 2006 11:06 AM
> >> To: corpora at lists.uib.no
> >> Cc: Kate Beeching; Briony Williams
> >> Subject: Re: [Corpora-List] 'Standard European English' ?
> >>
> >> Paul Buitelaar wrote:
> >>
> >>
> >>> Parveen and all, as far as I know the expression 'Standard European
> >>> English' is sometimes used to refer to British English (as
> >>>
> >> it differs
> >>
> >>> from US English).
> >>>
> >>
> >> Nice to know that us Brits are thought of as forming the
> >> standard for European (i.e. not US) English, but I rather doubt it.
> >>
> >>
> >>
> >>>
> >>> The current discussion on the list of 'Eurospeak' examples
> >>>
> >> however is
> >>
> >>> interesting
> >>>
> >>>
> >>
> >> Presumably there are plenty of equally hilarious examples of
> >> non-native
> >> French speakers' oddities in French, non-native German speakers'
> >> oddities in German, etc. But this being a resolutely
> >> anglophone list, we
> >> don't hear about them.
> >>
> >> Lou
> >>
> >>
> >>
> >
> >
> >

Ramesh Krishnamurthy
Lecturer in English Studies
School of Languages and Social Sciences
Aston University, Birmingham B4 7ET, UK
Tel: +44 (0)121-204-3812
Fax: +44 (0)121-204-3766
http://www.aston.ac.uk/lss/english/  
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