27.1392, Review: Socioling: Hickey (2015)

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Subject: 27.1392, Review: Socioling: Hickey (2015)

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Date: Mon, 21 Mar 2016 17:07:25
From: Christopher Strelluf [cstrell at nwmissouri.edu]
Subject: Standards of English

 
Discuss this message:
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Book announced at http://linguistlist.org/issues/26/26-1776.html

EDITOR: Raymond  Hickey
TITLE: Standards of English
SUBTITLE: Codified Varieties around the World
PUBLISHER: Cambridge University Press
YEAR: 2015

REVIEWER: Christopher Strelluf, Northwest Missouri State University

Reviews Editor: Helen Aristar-Dry

SUMMARY

_Standards of English_, edited by Raymond Hickey, examines global varieties of
English through the frames of codification and standardization. This
relationship between codification and standardization draws on Haugen’s (1966)
model, which posits that a variety undergoes a four-step process to become a
“standard” language (cf. pp. 18-19; 356-357):
 1) Selection: One dialect or sociolect is identified as the linguistic
standard.
 2) Acceptance: The selected variety gains broader community support.
 3) Elaboration: The selected variety is fleshed out to fulfill functions it
previously lacked.
 4) Codification: The selected variety is documented in dictionaries, guides,
etc.
Schneider’s (2007) Dynamic Model is also central to many of the chapters. 

The collection is organized geographically, beginning with the British Isles
and Europe, then moving to North America and the Caribbean, Africa, Asia, and
Oceania. Within each region, examinations move from the most definitively
standardized variety of English and work toward the least codified varieties. 

In Chapter 1, Raymond Hickey traces the establishment of “Standard English” in
Britain from the early 1700s to modern-day “New Prescriptivist” blogs and
homepages. Hickey then extends the concept of standard English from the “main
blocks” of British and American English to the range of global Englishes that
occupy shifting positions on a continuum of exonormative and endonormative
standardization.

In Chapter 2, Ingrid Tieken-Boon van Ostade examines the role of Robert
Lowth’s maligned _Short Introduction to English Grammar_ of 1762 in
establishing the prescriptivist tradition in Standard British English. She
identifies pressure from publishers for authors to write increasingly
prescriptive guidelines. She evaluates Lowth’s grammar to observe that he was
frequently not dogmatic, but that Lindley Murray’s grammar borrowed
selectively from Lowth to make Lowth’s descriptions strongly prescriptive.
Because Murray’s grammar sold widely, Tieken-Boon van Ostade attributes
Lowth’s negative reputation among modern linguists largely to Murray’s work.

Clive Upton describes differences among handbooks in descriptions of Received
Pronunciation in Chapter 3, with particular attention to the 2001 ''Oxford
Dictionary of Pronunciation for Current English''. He notes several important
updates, including placing the nucleus of the vowel in PRICE near the vowel in
STRUT, separating the nucleus of the vowel in MOUTH from the nucleus of PRICE,
and acknowledging the place of intrusive /r/ in Received Pronunciation.

John Corbett and Jane Stuart-Smith turn to Scottish English in Chapter 4. They
search the Scottish Corpus of Texts and Speech (SCOTS) for markers of broad
Scots, including lexical variants (e.g., _bairn_ rather than ‘child’),
phonology (e.g., _aboot_ for ‘about’), morpho-syntax (e.g., _yon_ to mark
distance from a subject), and discourse markers (e.g., _ken_ as a topic
marker). Their data suggests that Scots features are recessive, but are also
instrumentalized to emphasize Scottish identity. Scottish English also
participates in new supraregional and international English innovations.

In Chapter 5, Hickey studies the acceptability of features of Irish English.
Features like the resultative perfective (where _had_ indicates completion of
a planned action) and the second-person plural pronoun _ye_ achieve high
acceptability rates in many regions of Ireland. Other features like
habitual-DO show stigmatization or are in recession. These emerging
supraregional evaluations of Irish English variants position Irish as a
distinctly separate, endonormatively evaluated, variety from British English.

Englishes in Malta and the Channel Islands are examined in Manfred Krug and
Anna Rosen’s Chapter 6. They report usage preferences of lexical items that
differ between British and American variants (e.g., _lorry_ vs. _truck_). They
observe strong preferences for British variants, but note apparent-time trends
for some items in the direction of American (or global) variants. Similarly,
emerging stylistic preferences show local variants being more acceptable in
speech than in writing. These differentiations may represent endonormative
stabilization away from the languages’ British English origins.

Chapter 7, by William A. Kretzschmar, Jr. and Charles F. Meyer, turns to
American Englishes. They examine the idea of a Standard American English from
Webster’s spelling reform to modern “language mavens.” They call attention to
differences in frequency distributions in determining what is marked as
standard or nonstandard. Frequency distributions also show up in complicated
ways in prescriptivist works, with some low-frequency variants being isolated
as features to avoid, and others being pulled from low-frequency distributions
and championed as “correct.” Kretzschmar and Meyer ultimately tie “allegiance”
to Standard American English to a “voluntary association” in the sense of
Zelinsky’s (1992) work in cultural geography.

Charles Boberg describes Canadian English in Chapter 8, identifying its
overall North American character. He describes a Canadian reluctance to
identify any variety of Canadian speech as better than another, complicating
the notion of a “selected” Standard Canadian English (pp. 159-161). Boberg
describes a range of lexical, phonological, and phonetic features of Canadian
English that more often align with American English than British. He also
notes a number of distinctly Canadian lexical items (e.g., _chesterfield_ for
‘sofa’) and phonetic features (e.g., allophonic raising of the nucleus of the
vowel in MOUTH when the vowel is followed by a voiceless consonant) that mark
the independence of Standard Canadian English from other national standards.

In Chapter 9, Hubert Devonish and Ewart A. C. Thomas examine the continuum in
Standard Caribbean English between the English-lexicon Creole and Standard
British English. They test sentences containing English and Creole variants
for their “allowability” as Guyanese English. They also test Jamaican English
speaker intuitions for the influence of school-taught rules. They conclude
that today’s Caribbean Englishes are largely dependent on local teachers of
English whose intuitions about allowability helped develop a relationship of
“convergence and divergence” between Standard British English and
English-lexicon Creole (p. 195).

Sean Bowerman turns to South African Englishes in Chapter 10, and the roles
that White South African English and Black South African English play in
negotiating a standard (cf. van Rooy & Wasserman 2014; Wasserman & van Rooy
2014). He describes features of both varieties, including elements that
clearly distinguish the two, (e.g., double conjunctions, the rarity of
perfective-HAVE, and the leveling of gender in personal pronouns in Black
South African English). He suggests there is hope for a “restandardization” in
the direction of Black South African English as Standard South African
English.

Ulrike Gut describes Englishes in Nigeria, Cameroon, Ghana, Liberia, Sierra
Leone, and the Gambia in Chapter 11. He identifies each of these six countries
as having a distinct national English, rather than a West African regional
one. He reports studies that suggest slow progress toward recognition of these
national varieties as standards, in particular because of high prestige
assigned to British English.  Nigerian English appears closest to
standardization, with a relatively long history of codification and some
reports of speakers being evaluated negatively for sounding overly British
rather than Nigerian (p. 226). 

English in Kenya, Uganda, and Tanzania is examined in Chapter 12 by Josef
Schmied. East African English shares a position with Kiswahili as a lingua
franca among these countries, and also represents an important element of
participation in the global economy. East African English is not codified,
however. Schmied offers a starting point for such codification by describing
East African English vowels, consonants, inflectional morphology, syntax, and
lexical borrowings. He points at several East African English forms that might
move in the direction of standardization, such as non-count nouns marked as
plural and East African English interpretations of kinship terms.

Chapter 13 by Claudia Lange looks at South Asia, focusing on Indian English.
Lange cites previous research as identifying a strong adherence to
exonormative standards that prevents Indian English from achieving full
independence from its British roots, but also notes recent demographic changes
that have positioned English as a truly Indian language. She reviews studies
of Indian English that point in the direction of standardization. Among other
features, she notes that  the discourse particle _no_/_na_ is a
well-established borrowing into Indian English from Hindi rather than a highly
stigmatized form, and that uses of _only_ and _itself_ as presentational
markers have become differentiated by register.

Lisa Lim reviews developments in the South-East Asia Englishes in Chapter 14.
She traces the radically different roles of and relationships with English in
different countries in the region, ranging from the Malaysian government’s
sometime anti-English policies to Singapore’s widespread promotion of English
in schools. She describes Singapore English as the most obviously codified of
South-East Asia Englishes, differentiating even between Standard Singapore
English and Colloquial Singapore English. Lim concludes by noting that the
relationship between Standard and Colloquial Singapore English remains in
flux, with some features of Colloquial Singapore English being increasingly
accepted as standard.

Felicity Cox and Sallyanne Palethorpe review Standard Australian English in
Chapter 15. They report on the vowel systems of 116 female speakers in a new
Australian English corpus. They find sociolinguistic variation in productions
of vowels, primarily as a result of the type of school females attend, with
females who attend Government schools producing less markedly Australian
variants than females attending Catholic or Independent schools. However,
differences within the sample are relatively small, and the authors conclude
that this “reduction of the broadness continuum is the inevitable consequence”
of Australian English’s coming of age, placing Australia “on the cusp of a new
age in language where new variation is free to develop” (p. 313).

In Chapter 16, Elizabeth Gordon provides data on sound changes based on the
Canterbury Corpus. She finds New Zealand English to be socially stratified,
with changes that are associated with lower-class speakers—such as T-flapping
and changes in the nuclear onsets of PRICE, MOUTH, FACE, and GOAT—being
stigmatized. Other on-going changes operate below speaker awareness, including
/l/-vocalization, the raising of TRAP and DRESS and lowering of KIT, and the
NEAR-SQUARE merger. She also reviews studies of ongoing morphosyntactic
changes that reinforce the status of New Zealand English as a unique,
standardized variety.

Carolin Biewer turns to the Englishes of Fiji, Samoa, and the Cook Islands in
Chapter 17. She lists a number of features of these acrolectal varieties,
including omission of past tense and plural morphemes and _eh_ as an invariant
tag. She reports on local attitudes toward Englishes, showing that speakers
recognize their local Englishes as distinct from other Englishes. Teachers
also differentiate between “good” English and the English their students
speak, and older speakers criticize stylistic and structural innovations of
younger speakers, suggesting the development of standards-based evaluations.

In Chapter 18, Daniel Schreier asks why most Englishes have so far resisted
standardization. He traces a number of political, social, and linguistic
inhibitors. However, he also notes that, where standardization has occurred,
it has taken multiple generations for it to do so. So, for varieties like
Indian English and Nigerian English, resistance to standardization may simply
be a function of time. If this is the case, many varieties of English may
undergo standardization in the twenty-first century.

The collection concludes with a review by Hickey of the global spread of
English. This is followed by a glossary.

EVALUATION

_Standards of English_is an engaging and accessible examination of global
Englishes. On one level, the descriptions of varieties of English and on-going
changes in them are intrinsically interesting. They will be particularly
helpful for researchers of specific national varieties who hope to extend
their understanding to other national varieties. On a deeper level, the
collection implies a challenging set of questions about what language
standards mean and how researchers should think about standardization as an
interaction among language, society, ideology, and identity.

The collection makes it clear that a standard language means different things
depending on the variety under consideration. For a variety that has not been
codified, standardization may legitimate and empower its speakers. Bowerman,
for example, suggests that the recognition of Black South African English as
standard would benefit its speakers psychologically and in terms of national
identity (p. 209). Similarly, recognition of English varieties in the
Caribbean, West Africa, East Africa, Central Asia, South-East Asia, and
Polynesia might benefit speakers of those varieties as they participate in
global economies. In this sense, this collection has liberatory implications
as it may serve to codify or call for codification of varieties that are
largely unrecognized—for example, in the cases of Caribbean English as
presented by Devonish and Thomas; African Englishes as presented by Gut and by
Schmied, Maltese and Channel Island Englishes as presented by Krug and Rosen,
and Englishes in the South Pacific as presented by Biewer.

On the other hand, in varieties where a standard is overtly recognized, the
standard often becomes a tool of social prejudice (e.g., as described in
Lippi-Green’s 2012 treatment of Standard American English). This is especially
problematic since—as presented by Hickey and by Tieken-Boon van Ostade for
British English, and by Kretzschmar and Meyer for American English—a standard
language is often more an abstraction assembled from proscriptions than a
concrete set of practices. A language’s standardization, then, can be
liberating for speakers who were previously judged as deficient relative to an
imperial variety, but oppressive to speakers who may be deemed deficient
against the newly codified variety. Such social evaluations appear potentially
to be emerging in Singapore English as presented by Lim and Scottish English
as presented by Corbett and Stuart-Smith.

The idea of standard English is also slippery as authors deal with language
variation and change. A standard language is presumably conservative. However,
all the authors in this collection show that national varieties are actively
changing and—in cases like Australian English by Cox and Palethorpe, New
Zealand English by Gordon, and Canadian English by Boberg—these changes are
evidence of linguistic independence from exonormative standards. Moving beyond
the recognition that standard languages change (cf. Upton’s discussion of
updates to RP) to identifying change as indicative that a language has
achieved standardization suggests a renegotiation of the idea of standard
language.

The global purview of this collection also makes space for continued
evaluation of the relationships among Englishes. A distinction that Hickey
introduces between Irish Standard English and Standard Irish English—the
former being an Irish-inflected version of British English and the latter
being an Irish national variety of English—may be globally applicable. Given
the similarities among the most formal print registers of Englishes
internationally, it may be appropriate to think of varieties as participating
in both a standard global English and in separate national standards. Hence,
it may be desirable to look analytically at a British Standard English that
interacts with Nigerian Standard English, and to understand each of those as
different from Standard British English or Standard Nigerian English.

This discussion should make it clear that _Standards of English_ deserves a
wide audience. It will be of direct relevance to scholars interested in the
sociolinguistics and in the Englishes emerging and evolving around the world.
It should also be a resource for practitioners of English as a Foreign
Language and, more generally, for teachers who work with students from
currently non-codified varieties of English. On a personal note, Lange’s
description of Indian English forced me to evaluate whether, in interacting
with students from India and Nepal at my university, I might be incorrectly
identifying native features of their national Englishes as “L2 errors.” This
collection, indeed, offers a broad range of personal, disciplinary, and
scholarly lessons and challenges to researchers, teachers, and communicators
who interact with the global phenomenon of English.

REFERENCES

Haugen, Einer. 1966. Dialect, language, nation. _American Anthropologist_
68(6). 922-935.

Lippi-Green, Rosina. 2012. _English with an Accent: Language, ideology, and
discrimination in the United States. 2 edn. New York: Routledge.

van Rooy, Bertus & Ronel Wasserman. 2014. Do the Modals of Black and White
South African English Converge? _Journal of English Linguistics_ 42(1). 51-67.
doi:10.1177/0075424213511463

Schneider, Edgar W. 2007. _Postcolonial English: Varieties of English around
the world. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Wasserman, Ronel & Bertus van Rooy. 2014. The Development of Modals of
Obligation and Necessity in White South African English through Contact with
Afrikaans. _Journal of English Linguistics_ 42(1). 31-50.
doi:10.1177/0075424213514588

Zelinksy, Wilbur. 1992. _The cultural geography of the United States_. Revised
edn. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall.


ABOUT THE REVIEWER

Christopher Strelluf is Assistant Professor of English at Northwest Missouri
State University. His dissertation, _“We have such a normal, non-accented
voice”: A sociophonetic study of English in Kansas City_, is available at
http://catpages.nwmissouri.edu/m/cstrell/kc_speech.htm





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