Varieties of English

What is Varieties of English?



Varieties of English is the study of different English exist in the world. It also unveil the students to the history and origin of the English language. This course is designed to expose the different English to the learners. Some of the subtopics in this subject includes the Queen English also known as Received Pronunciation (RP), the differences between American and British English, Nigerian English, Singaporean English as well as Malaysian English. The subject also teaches the students about pidgin and creole, spread and stratification, language variation and language change as well as context.






Provided is a video of the history of English Language. Enjoy it! :)


Provided is a video on British vs American pronunciation. Enjoy it! :)
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Here are some usable links for the introduction of Varieties of English 
  1. http://ic-migration.webhost.uits.arizona.edu/icfiles/ic/lsp/site/
  2. http://www.icaltefl.com/index.php/varieties-of-english/varieties-of-english.html?gclid=CNOxiuzN_70CFUOTjgodbIgAmA
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Language Variation

People talk differently. It is all depending on:
1. Who they are?
2. Where they come from?
3. Are they educated or not?
4. Are they at ease or are trying to impress anyone in particular?

      What can be concluded from the factors is that speakers adjust their behaviour to the needs of the situation and manipulate it with distinguishable skill.

      What is important is that the speaker and the hearer share knowledge, subconsciously, on how the message is intended is encoded and decoded.

     Linguists today stress on the fact that languages vary and systematically, correlate it with "sociolinguistics parameters" such as:
 i. speaker's regional origin
ii. gender
iii. age.
iv. status
v. context of situation

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What are these terms?

In learning Varieties of English (VoE), there are some terms that we need to be familiar with and they are:
  • Pidgins
  • Creoles
  • Dialects
  • Slang 

What is pidgins? Well according to DeCamp (1971), he defines a pidgin as a contact vernacular, normally not the native language of any of its speaker. It is characterized by a limited vocabulary, an elimination of many grammatical devices such as number and gender, and a drastic reduction of redundant features. DeCamp (1971) says that more than two languages in contact are required for the development of a true pidgin.

What is creole? The term Creole originally meant a white man of European descent born and raised in a tropical or semitropical colony. The meaning was later extended to include indigenous natives and others of non-European origin. The term was then subsequently applied to certain languages spoken by creoles in and around the Caribbean and in West Africa, and then more generally to other languages of similar types which had arisen in similar circumstances. The development from Pidgin into Creole involves an expansion of expressive forces in response to communicative needs.
The main difference between a pidgin and a Creole lies in terms of the feature referred to as vitality. This means whether the language has a viable community of native speakers. Pidgins and Creoles share some features. That is, they lack standardization, historicity, and autonomy, but are reduced, mixed languages.

Pidgins and Creoles are considered as language. Therefore both have linguistics features which describe them:
  • The sounds of pidgins or creoles are likely to be fewer and less complicated in their possible arrangements than those of the corresponding standard languages.
  • Another typical feature of pidgins and creoles is consonantal cluster reduction. This results in a rather simple syllable structure of pidgins and creoles (CV-structure), which also makes the pronunciation of words simpler.
  • There is almost a complete lack of inflection in nouns, pronouns, verbs and adjectives in pidgins and creoles.
  • Another feature of Creole and pidgin morphology is the reduction or elimination of gender distinctions.
  • Another linguistic feature of pidgins and creoles is their use of reduplication. Reduplication is a morphological process by which the root or stem of a word, or part of it, is repeated 

What is dialect? When there are systematic differences in the way groups speak a language, we say that each group speaks a dialect of that language. Dialects are mutually intelligible forms of a language that differ in systematic ways. It is not always easy to decide whether the differences between two speech communities reflect two dialects or two languages. Sometimes this rule-of-thumb definition is used: When dialects become mutually unintelligible – when the speakers of one dialect group can no longer understand the speakers of another dialect group – these dialects become different languages.
Bored with lengthy words? Too many words to read? Then enjoy the video provided to understand what is pidgins and creoles.

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Varities of English around

As the name of the subject suggested, Varieties of English (VoE) provides ranges of various English exist in the whole wide world. Being most countries' second language, English is adapted for the daily communication but with the twist of having their own distinctive characteristics which belong only to one community. 
Some of the different versions of English learned throughout the semester were: 
  1. Hong Kong English
  2. Nigerian Pidgin English
  3. Cameroon Pidgin English
  4. Malaysian English
Interestingly, although English is the native/mother tongue of the United States of America and the United Kingdom, there also exist the different varieties of English there. Bostonians, New Yorkers, Texans, blacks in Chicago, whites in Denver and Hispanics all exhibit variation in the way they speak English. In UK similarly, people there demonstrate different slang, accent and features differ geographically.

Varieties of English in America:
  1. African American English
  2. Latino(Hispanic) English
  3. Chicano English
Varieties of English in UK:
  1. London cockney English
  2. Norwich (East Anglia) English
  3. Welsh English
  4. South Wales English
  5. West Midlands English
  6. Bradford (West Yorkshire) English
However, do not be mistaken that the varieties of English language mention here are all different altogether. These VoE exhibit some distinctive features which make them differ from each other. With only a little bit of dissimilarities here and there.
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World Englishes


In this post, we will explain some of the lexical, linguistics and grammatical features of the varieties of English mentioned above.
Hong Kong English [HKE]
HKE lexical inventory :
  • Standard English inventory
·               Borrowings from local languages such as Cantonese.
  [eg: Mahjong : a game / Kwalilo : a foreigner]
English lexical items adapted or created for the local situation.
[eg: Astronaut – a HK person who has emigrated overseas with his/her family, but returns to work in HK, and frequently flies between the places]
  • Rare English words current in HKE 
         [eg: Shroff – a payment counter /Nullah – a monsoon drain]

HKE grammatical features : 
  • Lack of Subject-Agreement [eg: One of the team members are going]
  • Article omission [eg: It is used by (X) human body.]
  • Verb and verb phrases in HKE [eg: finite vs non-finite, auxiliaries]
  • Clause and sentences structure in HKE [eg: coordination, predicators and subordination] 

Nigerian Pidgin English (NPE)


Linguistics features :
  • Vowels are reduced from their usual qualities. [eg:  /e/ --- [ei], /o/ --- [u] and /∂/--- [ae], /u/ --[u:]]
  •  Consonants are realized differently [eg: /θ/ --- [s] or [t], /ð/ ---[d] or [z]]
  •  Stress in NPE appeared to be influenced by the tone syllable.

Cameroon Pidgin English (CamP)

Linguistics features :
  • Linguistic items borrowed from English are simply monosyllabic or disyllabic lexical items which undergo a morphological process of compounding to yield different CamP words and expressions that are morphologically and semantically  different from their English counterparts.  
  • Examples: 
    Sense-boy = an intelligent person 
    A walker-boy = a traveler  
  •  Walker-book = passport
  • Book-man = educated person
  • Bush-cow = buffalo  


Malaysian English

As for Malaysian English, you can go through our previous post on CMC Research. 

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The Birth of English Language
The birth of English

The English language which gradually replaced Celtic in England and south eastern Scotland from the 5th century onwards is most closely related historically to three other modern languages: German, Dutch and Frisian. These languages are "related" because they are descended from a common parent language called West Germanic. West Germanic was spoken in what is now the Netherlands, northern Germany and southern Denmark about 2,000 years ago.
If we were to ask when English first came into being as a language, what we would really be asking, then, would be: when did it start breaking away from the other West Germanic languages, and especially from Frisian, which is its closest relative. Frisian is still spoken today in Friesland, the northern part of the Netherlands. It was long recognised as being a language rather similar to English, and East Anglian fisherman had a rhyme which went:
Bread, butter and green cheese
Is good English and good Friese.

The Frisians, too, still have a version of the same rhyme:

Bûter, brea en griene tsiis
Is goed Ingelsk en goed Fries.
So English first came into existence when it began to separate from the other West Germanic dialects and acquire its own identity. And this happened when speakers of West Germanic, who had originally crossed the North Sea from mainland Europe as raiders and mercenaries during the Roman occupation, first started to overwinter, and then settle permanently, in Britain. These people were members of the tribal groupings of Angles, Saxons, Jutes and Frisians who came mainly from coastal districts just across the North Sea from Britain.
The form of the English language that was spoken in England and southeastern Scotland from the time of the arrival of the West Germanic peoples until about 1100 is called Anglo-Saxon or, more correctly, Old English.
English was later rather heavily influenced by Old Norse, between the 9th and 11th centuries, as a result of the Viking invasions. And the arrival of the French-speaking Normans in 1066 also had an enormous effect on the language.







Attached is a link from Youtube on a documentary: English Birth of a Language 


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The spread of English



By the Middle Ages English had spread to the extent that it was the main native language in all of England except Devon and Cornwall in the southwest, Cumbria and in the northwest, and some areas adjacent to Wales, where Welsh was still spoken.

Four hundred years ago, in 1600, English didn't have an important role as a foreign or second language anywhere, and it was spoken as a native language in a very small area of the globe indeed: it was the native language of the indigenous population in most of England, and in the south and east of Scotland. It was still absent from much of Cornwall and from Welsh-speaking parts of Shropshire and Herefordshire; most of Ireland was Irish-speaking; nearly all of Wales was still Welsh-speaking; the Highlands and Hebridean Islands of Scotland spoke Gaelic; Orkney and Shetland spoke Scandinavian Norn; the Isle of Man was Manx-speaking; and the Channel Islands were still French-speaking.

During the course of the 1600s this situation changed dramatically. English arrived as a native language, as a result of colonisation, in Ireland, in what is now the United States, and in Bermuda, Newfoundland, the Bahamas, and the Turks and Caicos Islands. It also spread during this time into many island and mainland areas of the Caribbean as well as to eastern coastal and island areas of Honduras, Nicaragua and Colombia which remain English-speaking to this day.

During the 18th century English began its expansion into Wales and north western Scotland, and mainland and maritime Canada. In the 19th century, again as a result of colonisation, English expanded to Hawaii, and into the Southern Hemisphere - not only to Australia, New Zealand and South Africa, but also to the South Atlantic Islands of St. Helena, Tristan da Cunha and the Falklands. There was also expansion from the Caribbean islands to eastern coastal areas of Costa Rica and Panama; and Caribbean Islands which had previously been French-speaking started on a process of becoming English-speaking to different degrees: Dominica, St Lucia, Trinidad and Tobago, Grenada, and St Vincent and the Grenadines.

There are also today long-standing indigenous groups of British-origin native English speakers in Namibia, Botswana, Zimbabwe and Kenya. Many of these areas now have their own distinctive forms of the language. We can distinguish in particular North American, Caribbean, Southern African, and Australasian English.


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 The History of English Language

Do you have the answer?



Attached is a link to the History of English Language.

Through your reading from the site provided, try to answer the following question:

Imagine yourself being a member of Celtic family suddenly being faced with Anglo-Saxon invaders in the late fifth century somewhere in central England, a member of a Native America tribe being faced with white settlers in the seventeenth century somewhere in New England, or a member of an Aboriginal tribe being faced with Europeans somewhere in south-eastern Australia late in the eighteenth century. How would you try to cope with the situation, generally and linguistically? Do you see any possible parallels between the three scenarios? Where would you see the main differences between these situations?

Source: English Around the World by Edgar W. Schneider (p. 107)

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