More Englishes: New Studies in Varieties of English, 1988–1994 1556194447, 9781556194443

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MORE ENGLISHES

Varieties of English Around the World General Editor: Manfred Görlach Englisches Seminar Univesität zu Köln Albertus-Magnus-Platz 1 D-50923 KÖLN Germany

GENERAL SERIES Volume 13 Manfred Görlach More Englishes: New Studies in Varieties of English 1988-1994

MORE ENGLISHES NEW STUDIES IN VARIETIES OF ENGLISH 1988-1994

MANFRED GÖRLACH Universität zu Köln

JOHN BENJAMINS PUBLISHING COMPANY AMSTERDAM/PHILADELPHIA

The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences — Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1984.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Görlach, Manfred. More Englishes : new studies in varieties of English, 1988-1994 / Manfred Görlach, p. cm. - (Varieties of English around the world. General series, ISSN 0172-7362 ; v. 13) Includes bibliographical references (p. ) and index. 1. English language-Variation-Foreign countries. 2. Communication, International. 3. Languages in contact. I. Title. II. Series. PE2751.G675 1995 427--dc20 95-35084 ISBN 90-272 4871 0 (Eur.) / 1-55619-444-7 (US) (alk. paper) CIP © Copyright 1995 - John Benjamins B.V. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form, by print, photoprint, microfilm, or any other means, without written permission from the publisher. John Benjamins Publishing Co. · P.O.Box 75577 · 1070 AN Amsterdam · The Netherlands John Benjamins North America · P.O.Box 27519 · Philadelphia, PA 19118-0519 · USA

CONTENTS Preface/More Englishes 1

7- 9

Varietas delectat: forms and functions of English around the world [1988]

10- 38

2

Innovation in new Englishes [1994]

39- 60

3

Word-formation and the ENL: ESL: EFL distinction [1989]

61- 92

4

Heteronymy in International English [1990]

93-123

5

Dictionaries of transplanted Englishes [1990]

6

Irish English and Irish culture in dictionaries of English [ Text types and Indian English [1993/94]

7 8

124-163

1994/95]

164-191 192-219

Sociolinguistic determinants for literature in dialects and minority languages: Max and Moritz in Scots [1990/92]

220-245

References

246-268

Indexes

269-276

ABBREVIATIONS Affi AmE AusE BrE CanE CarE EDD EFL EModE EngE ENL ESL ESP EWW IndE IntE IrE ME NigE NZE OE OED PC PE PrE R.P. SAffi SAsE ScE SgE St E TL UsE WAfE

African English American English Australian English British English Canadian English Caribbean English English Dialect Dictionary English as a foreign language Early Modern English English English English as a native language English as a second language English for special purposes English World-Wide Indian English International English Irish English Middle English Nigerian English New Zealand English Old English Oxford English Dictionary Pidgin & creole language Pidgin English Present English Received Pronunciation South African English South Asian English Scottish English Singapore English Standard English Transplanted language United States English West African English

PREFACE The spread of English around the world is certainly one of the more remarkable phenomena of recent times. English is the native language in countries (includ­ ing England itself) to which it was brought by English-speaking colonizers. It is the native language of descendants of immigrants speaking other languages, who came to lands already colonized by English speakers. It is the second lan­ guage of countries within the hegemony of native English-speaking countries, to which it was extended by military and commercial forces. It is a foreign language used in many lands for scholarly, commercial, technological, and diplomatic purposes. It is a language of special purposes, for example, air traffic control. In the extent and diversity of its uses, English is matched by no other present or past language of our species. That is not a statement of triumphalism, but of simple fact. Whenever a language spreads geographically or socially, we can expect to see its varieties diversify both in their number and in their degree of diversifi­ cation. And we expect that the diverse varieties may become in time separate languages, as Latin became Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Romanian, and so on. The world varieties of English have certainly diversified, their diversity being a major subject of this book. However, the pattern of past linguistic history may not be repeated. New factors of electronic communication and air travel are likely to prevent the fracturing of English into mutually incomprehensible languages. Locally divergent forms of English may drift off into separate languages, but the core of English is likely to remain a varied, diversified, but recognizably 'same' language. All the present-day varieties of English are descendants of the English spoken in Britain during the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. That time is a watershed in the history of the English language. Before it, the many local varieties of English were all contained within that tight little island. After it, the proliferation of varieties resulted in the present spread of 'more Englishes', from which should not be excluded varieties within Britain and even southern England, such as RP and its recent challenger, Estuary English. Intra-insular 'new Englishes' need attention too. Manfred Görlach is the leading European authority on world varieties of English, the range of his writings on the topic being unmatched. This collection brings together eight recent papers that together provide an overview of the subject ranging from a survey of formal and functional varieties of English around the world, through studies of the ways they innovate and of their lexi-

[7]

cographical treatment, to examinations of culture, text types, and translational problems in three particular varieties: Irish, Indian, and Scots. My own favorite of these papers, because of its challenging but promising proposal for a dictionary of world varieties, is "Heteronymy in international English". This paper is programmatic in outlining a study of what for many people is the most important distinction between varieties: their use of different terms for the same referent. It also analyzes the problems inherent in doing such a study. No one volume can cover all varieties of English or all aspects of even selected varieties. But this book surveys the distribution of varieties outside England proper, considers approaches to studying them, and provides informa­ tion about how they differ. It is a knowledgeable, insightful, and stimulating treatment of "More Englishes" around the world. John Algeo University of Athens, Ga.

[8]

More Englishes The eight papers here assembled form, as the title indicates, a sequel to those in Englishes (Görlach 1991a); all derive from conference papers or guest lec­ tures presented in various parts of the world. My research interests and methods have remained largely what they were before, but there are various topics and regions here treated that were not covered in Englishes. I therefore hope that the present collection will make stimulating reading for those who know my earlier volume, and will attract others to the exciting field of varieties of English around the world, which has established itself as a thriving branch of sociolinguistics. The papers are here presented as originally published or delivered, but I have adapted them for the present purpose by providing cross-references and by updating data and bibliographical references where necessary. These textual changes and additional footnotes are not indicated in the text. The illustrations at the end of chapters come from 19th-century editions of Punch (38, 60, 191), from a stamp (92), from the title page of Annand's trans­ lation (245) or are re-used from Englishes (38, 163). Many colleagues have seen these papers (or listened to them) and made helpful remarks, in particular: Rebecca Agheyisi, Jack Aitken, John Algeo, Helmut Bonheim, Jean Branford, John Davis, Terry Dolan, Beat Glauser, John Holm, John Honey, Jeff Kallen, Catherine Macafee, J.Derrick McClure, Seamus Ó Maoláin, Raja Ram Mehrotra, Colin Milton, W.S. Ramson and Edgar W. Schneider. Critical audiences in various countries have helped me to reconsider individual points and to rephrase my statements. I am grateful to Christoph Stephan and Katja Lenz, who have produced an immaculate laser printout after solving many technical problems, and, in par­ ticular, to Helen Weiss, whose innumerable suggestions on contents and style have greatly improved the text. Cologne, March 1995

Manfred Görlach

[9]

VARIETAS DELECTAT: FORMS AND FUNCTIONS OF ENGLISH AROUND THE WORLD1

1. History of research The world-wide spread of English has taken 500 years in all to complete, but the major developments have taken place in the course of the last 200 years. It is surprising that the problems connected with the topic have found less scholarly interest than might well have been expected.2 Although there have been a great number of studies on the question of English as an international auxiliary language, and national varieties, such as those of the United States and Australia, have been discussed, important data and hypotheses are still lacking in the field: it still remains doubtful (even in 1995!) how far traditional linguistic methods can be applied to the subject. It may be symptomatic for the state of knowledge (and the extent of interest) that most histories of the English lan­ guage, even of recent date (excepting Leith 1983) deal with the topic only in passing, although the relevant phenomena are, linguistically and historically, well documented, or at least much better than the favourite playgrounds of historical linguistics. As regards the history of research, the preference given to older periods by traditional philologies and the homogeneity of language systems l

The present article is an updated and rewritten English version of a state-of-the-art account that first appeared in German as a commissioned paper in Studium Linguistik 15 (1984), 10-35 (Görlach 1984b) and was later republished under the present title in the B. Strang memorial volume (= Görlach 1988b). The following remarks reflect my own thinking over the past fifteen years, but they may also owe more than I am aware of to my editing of Bailey and Görlach (1982) and of English World-Wide (1980-94) and Varieties of English Around the World (1979-94). Although some of my remarks made more than ten years ago sound more customary today, many of the problems mentioned remain unsolved in 1995. The paper can therefore still serve as an intro­ ductory chapter to the present collection. 2

John Holm (1984), in his review of Bailey and Görlach (1982), pointed out that the entity 'English as World Language' makes better sense from a standpoint outside Britain or America; if the problem is looked at from London or Washington, there is always the danger of prescribing a certain norm, or letting oneself be influenced by political considerations.

1 Forms and functions of English around the world

11

postulated, or at least tacitly assumed, by various structuralist schools and their transformational heirs, which stressed the systematic aspects and the competence of the ideal native speaker, explain why problems of ordered variation were not focused on. Scholarly interest in 'New Englishes' and their functions would have been difficult to justify: most colonial forms of native English were considered provincial, backward, incorrect and not quite respectable (similar criticisms were earlier levelled at AmE). Second-language varieties fared even worse: most were discarded as gibberish; their apparent lack of system did not make them serious candidates for Ph.D. theses or other forms of scholarly attention. It was the rediscovery of the social and communicative functions of language, and of variation as a phenomenon governed by social and functional rules, together with the growing national self-confidence of peoples using English, that made the time ripe for new research. Such tendencies were reinforced by Labov's work in quantificational sociolinguistics, by American interest in minority dialects, particularly Black English, and by an increase in the linguistic attention paid to such areas of study as language acquisition, bilingualism, and pidgin and creole languages. Finally, traditional dialectology turned to the social causes and effects of variation, and began to take account of urban dialects and class distinctions in speech. Once these conditions for new research had been created in the 1960s, a wealth of scholarly publications from 1973 on illustrates how results were collected, sifted, compared and made available for academic teaching.3 When

3

An exhaustive documentation, itself an indicator of the new wave of scholarly interest, can be found in the bibliography of Viereck et al. (1984) continued in Glauser et al. (1993). The fact that 1965 was chosen as the cut-off date in these compilations reflects the change in linguistic interest. A selective bibliography of books on the topic is found in Bailey and Görlach (1982:467-79), but it may be useful to list here the most important handbooks and journals etc. (1973-94) illustrating the trend: 1973 R.W. Bailey and J. Robinson, Varieties of Present-Day English. 1974 D. Bahr, Standard English und seine geographischen Varianten. 1977 Κ. Wächtler, Geographie und Stratifikation der englischen Sprache; J.A. Fishman, The Spread of English. The Sociology of English as an Additional Language. 1979 J.C. Richards, ed., New Varieties of English; Varieties of English Around the World. 1980 W.R. O'Donnell and L. Todd, Variety in Contemporary English; English World-Wide. 1981 L. Smith, ed., English for Cross-cultural Communication. 1982 R.W. Bailey and M. Görlach, eds., English as a World Language; J.C. Wells, Accents of English; P. Trudgill and J. Hannah, International English; B.B. Kachru, ed., The Other Tongue. English Across Cultures; J. Pride, ed., New Englishes. 1983 B.B. Kachru, The Indianization of English.

12

1 Forms and functions of English around the world

looking at publication dates, one must be aware of the fact that handbooks take years to get into print. With all these books now available, it now seems worth­ while to summarise, and comment on, the results and critical insights of the new discipline that has established itself. 2. The spread of English The spread of English was a much slower and more laborious process than its present distribution would lead one to expect. Around 1500 the New World was divided up by Papal edict between Spain and Portugal, and a little later on, the Dutch and the French became serious competitors for naval supremacy on the seven seas and at the trading posts established on the coasts. England had internal problems to settle in the 16th century: there could be no thought of exporting English settlers and the English way of life (including the English language) until the late 16th century. Only then did the anglicisation of Wales and Ireland begin (Leith 1983, Bailey 1984); in 1603 the Union of the Crowns joined England, Scotland and Ireland into one kingdom, and bound the new provinces to London speech norms. Moreover, this was the period in which the first attempts at English settlements in Newfoundland and Georgia fall (both in 1582). Daniel's much-quoted prophetic words of 1599 illustrate the accom­ panying change in linguistic attitudes towards the vernacular,4 in the wake of England's first bid for world power after the defeat of the Armada:

1984 J.T. Piatt, et al, The NewEnglishes',L. Todd, Modern Englishes: Pidgins and Creoles. 1985 English Today; World Englishes (revived). 1986 B.B. Kachru, The Alchemy of English. The Spread, Functions and Models of NonNative Englishes; P. Trudgill, Dialects in Contact; R. McCrum et al, The Story of English. 1991 J. Cheshire, ed., English around the World. Sociolinguistic Perspectives; F. Chevillet, Les variétés de l'anglais; M. Görlach, Englishes. Studies in Varieties of English 19841988. 1994 R. Burchfield, ed., English in Britain and Overseas: Origins and Development; G. Mazzon, Le lingue inglesi. The conspectus shows that there was a notable peak of handbooks etc. 1979-86. 4

The decisive point in the growth of confidence in the English vernacular is usually dated around 1575, cf. Jones (1953:168-213), Leith (1983), Görlach (1985a). The passage from Daniel was quoted in Görlach (1988b), and was chosen as a motto for Bailey & Görlach (1982): note the unique fusion of educational and mercantile aspects in the metaphors employed.

1 Forms and f unctions of English around the world

13

And who in time knowes wither we may vent The treasure of our tongue, to what strange shores This gaine of our best glorie shal be sent. T'inrich vnknowing Nations with our stores? What worlds in th'yet vnformed Occident May come refin'd with th'accents that are ours? Samuel Daniel, Musophilus (1599, 1. 957ff.)

In North America, parts of the Caribbean were wrested from the Spanish, and other colonies were taken from the Dutch and Swedes in 'New England' in the 17th century, while the French were routed in Canada in the 18th. Whereas the spread of English was fairly successful on the American continent, it was very slow elsewhere. The period 1788-1835 marked a breakthrough with first settlements in Australia and New Zealand, the conquest of Cape Province, and also the beginning of the anglicisation of the school system in India. These expansions laid the foundations for the stabilisation of the Victorian Empire in which peoples with a great multitude of cultures and languages were adminis­ tered from a tiny mother country with the help of one language — English. This world-wide expansion is particularly noteworthy when one considers the blow the British had suffered through the breakaway of their major colony in North America. The final phase came with the erosion of the Empire (though parts of it live on in the Commonwealth) and — in spite of a certain loss of ESL functions — the unpredicted growth of English internationally, as a consequence of the supremacy of English-speaking nations such as Great Britain, the U.S.A., Canada, South Africa, Australia and New Zealand in trade and industry, science and technology, and politics. The fascinating history of this expansion is a mixture of colonial force and deliberate submission, economic convenience on the part of the Europeans, and faith in progress or pragmatic utility on that of non-Europeans. The history of English in India has often been adduced as evidence for such mixed motives. In 1823 Raja Rammohan Roy proposed employing European gentlemen of talent and education to instruct the natives of India in mathematics, natural philosophy, chemistry, anatomy and other useful sciences, which the natives of Europe have carried to a degree of perfection that has raised them above the inhabitants of other parts of the world,

thus stressing the importance of the English language for the modernisation of the country. The value of anglicisation for the colonial administrators was clearly stated in Macaulay's Minutes of 1835: That Minute proclaimed the need to form a subculture in India: "a class who may be interpreters between us and the millions we govern, a class of persons,

14

1 Forms and functions of English around the world Indians in blood and colour, but English in taste, in opinion, in morals and in intellect" (R.R. Roy and T.B. Macaulay, quoted from Kachru 1982a:355)

It is especially illuminating to compare the successes of English with the overseas expansion of Spanish (Milan 1983, Lipski 1994) and of French (Gor­ don 1978, Valdman 1979), and, to a lesser degree, with that of Portuguese and Dutch.5 The following features seem to be typical of the historical spread of English: 1.

English began to spread when the language had achieved homogeneity in its written form (and, by and large, also in the phonemic structure of its spoken form) and this form had been accepted as the standard. Kurath (1972:68) claimed convincingly that this was the case with early AmE, and if it is true of AmE, then certainly also of the English of later settlements elsewhere.

2.

English was successful to a surprising degree. Unlike Spanish, French and, especially, German communities abroad, there has never been a sizeable English-speaking group of settlers (since the Anglo-Irish of the Middle Ages) that gave up their mother-tongue.6 The only ones in danger of doing so today are comparatively small groups of speakers of (creole) English in Central America (on the Atlantic coast of Nicaragua, Costa Rica and Panama, cf. Holm 1983). Where English has ceased to function as a second language (as is the case in Tanzania, Malaysia or, partly, the Philippines, cf. Llamzon 1986, Sibayan 1994), its uses as an international foreign language are unchallenged and are, in fact, expanding.

3.

Colonial communities unquestioningly accepted metropolitan norms (in language and other areas involving value judgements) until the First

5

A detailed comparative history of the imposition and acceptance of English and French would be particularly rewarding. Apart from political considerations, the different role of French is generally seen as a matter of attitude: the stress placed on its mission civilatrice, on correctness à la Paris, and on the integrative function of French as a second language (which makes its speakers participants in French culture) have certainly been more dominant than in the history of English abroad. (These aspects of the French tradition are, however, exaggerated in Gordon 1978.) Wardhaugh (1987) and Phillipson (1992) have contributed greatly to getting the sociolinguistic discussion going; also cf. Laforge & McConnell (1990) and Görlach (1995d). 6

This remark even applies to individual immigrants: the only exception to the rule in modern history appears to be the case of Israel, where American Jews, under some pressure from the community, gave up their English or at least did not pass it on to their children.

1 Forms and functions of English around the world

15

World War (in the USA at least until 1776), an attitude that was bound up with inferiority complexes regarding cultural dependence and a strong desire for prescriptive rules, e.g. in the form of grammars. 4.

Outside settler communities, the integrative functions of English were much weaker. Imitation of the British way of life was found in an extreme form in the 19th-century Krio community in Freetown and in some circles in colonial India (where reading Shakespeare, Milton and Wordsworth was considered an indispensable part of all English-medium education), but pragmatic values, for both sides, always complemented, and often dominated, such cultural functions world-wide. These politically neutral utilitarian considerations made possible the continued use of English in post-colonial societies and its impressive expansion as an international language after 1945.7

The success of English in its function as an international auxiliary language has often been regarded as the measure of its adequacy for the job, and scholars have tried to account for it with reference to the type of language English is. In particular, its reduced inflectional system (which was largely identical with 'grammar' for Latin-influenced grammarians) has been mentioned as favouring such international functions. These reflections have led on to further plans for deliberate simplification and attempts to make English even easier to teach and to learn.8 Brosnahan (1973) tried to systematise the factors responsible for successes and failures in language spread; he names the following variables: 1. 2. 3. 4.

imposition as a consequence of military conquest; length of colonial rule; linguistic heterogeneity of the conquered population; material rewards.

Fishman et al. think that the significance of these factors is difficult to judge; they add the following, based on the historical facts of the spread of English (1977:80-1): 5. urbanisation; 7

This aspect is central in Mazrui (1975); note that the highly positive evaluation of English in this context has since given way to a more sober view. 8

Such attempts may apply to orthography only or they can include other levels of speech. Probably best known in this context are BASIC English, Michael West's attempts to set up a core vocabulary, or recent discussions of Nuclear English. Opinions vary on whether 'simplicity' of language is open to scholarly definition. Also compare section 10.

16

6. 7. 8. 9.

1 Forms and functions of English around the world

economic development; educational development; religious composition (of the population); political affiliation (of the government in question).

All these factors are interdependent and therefore do not permit operational quantification. Fishman et al.v in their accounts of the status of English, further add (1977:83): 10. official status; 11. language of government administration; 12. lingua franca within country; 13. technical language; 14. first foreign language studied by most students; 15. use in universities; 16. percentage of daily newspapers in English; 17. use on radio; 18. percentage of books published in English; 19. medium, or subject, of instruction in primary or secondary schools; 20. percentage of population in primary and secondary school English classes. Of these, 10, 11 and 14 have proved to be especially relevant; they closely correlate with the factors 'former British colony' and 'multilingualism of inhabitants': in fact, the more or less unilingual countries of the Third World are found mainly among non-British ex-colonies, whereas former British 'posses­ sions' such as Ghana, Nigeria, Cameroon, Kenya, India, Singapore or Papua New Guinea are characterised by extreme multilingualism. The usefulness of English as a supraregional standard with high international prestige is obvious. Further additions to the list, such as English as the dominant language in industry and trade, have been proposed, but they overlap with those already mentioned. 3. Settlement history and new varieties The Scandinavian settlement of 10th-century England is still an indispensable factor in understanding some of the regional peculiarities of present-day BrE dialects; the fact that settlers in 17th-century Ulster came from Scotland and the West Midlands accounts for many regional distinctions in the modern dialects of the area. To what extent does the origin of settlers help to account for nonEuropean varieties of English?

1 Forms and functions of English around the world

17

The settlement phase of English continued until about 1860; it spread, almost without exception, EngE speech forms — the last expansion of Scots dates back to the 17th century, in the course of the Ulster Plantations and the scotticisation of the Orkney and Shetland Islands; the Bahamas, Sierra Leone and especially Liberia were recipients of American settlers.9 Four overseas areas may serve to illustrate the interdependence of settlement history and modern varieties: 1.

Kurath (1972:40-2) has convincingly shown that the tri-partition of the dialects of AmE reflects the geographically separate settlement areas (and speech communities) of the 17th century and later westward migration starting from these bases. Although the analysis of DARE data by Carver (1987) has slightly modified our views, Kurath's main claims are still valid. The developments of the 18th and 19th centuries, however, make clear how strong the levelling tendencies were, which made AmE more homogeneous than BrE has ever been. The history of AmE is especially important as an explanatory model for New Englishes in other regions, because AmE is the earliest and best documented settler variety.

2.

The Caribbean region provides less relevant material than might have been expected. Apart from the levelling, also found in AmE, this is mainly because the number of whites (i.e. of native speakers of English) was dwarfed by that of blacks early on, and their pidgin and creole speech forms 'melted down' dialectal features found among the white settlers beyond recognition. But it is remarkable that the isolation of individual islands did not lead to the preservation of settlers' dialects: this might have been expected on Montserrat, a tiny island of 12,000 inhabitants where a high percentage of the original settlers came from Ireland.10

9

This simplifying statement passes over some Scottish-based features of Southern NZE, Irish and Scottish features in Ottawa Valley English, and similar instances — all of which retain but few and usually recessive features, showing that even a high level of homogeneity in immigrants' speech and the relative isolation of settlements did not suffice to preserve very distinctive dialects in non-European surroundings; in this they differ from German dialects such as Palatinate-based Pennsylvania Dutch etc. For a more detailed analysis cf. Trudgill (1986) and Görlach (1995d). 10 Richard Blome states in his Britannia (1673:341): "It is most inhabited by the Irish, who have here a Church for Divine worship." Wells (1982:586) corrects the widespread assump­ tion of Irish characteristics surviving in the local creole: "It is popularly claimed that Mont­ serratians speak with an Irish accent. [...] there is no justification for this claim."

18

1 Forms and functions of English around the world

3.

The most convincing illustration of how settlement history has affected regional varieties of English abroad is provided by the varieties of SAfE (Lanham 1982). The Dutch had been present as a colonial power in the Cape Province from 1652; the English, who had long been interested in forts in this region, which would enable them to make the route to India safer, took the Cape Province in 1806. Shortly after, some 4-5,000 Englishmen from the south of England, mostly lower class, settled in the eastern half of the new colony, where Lord Charles Somerset made the English language official in 1822 and forced it, at least for public use, on the Dutch population — with the help of great numbers of teachers and parsons imported for the purpose. The Great Trek of the Boers from 1838 onwards then transported Dutch and Cape English into the new republics of the interior. A second settlement was started in Natal (v48-62), which consisted mainly of officers and other members of the middle class, who here created a bourgeois Victorian Little England and cultivated standard BrE as a prestige form. This Natal English provided a model for Johannesburg, when it came to develop into an industrial and commercial English centre deep in the Boer hinterland from 1880. Even today, it is claimed, the broad Cape dialect is stigmatised partly because of its closeness to Afrikaans English, whereas Natal English may sound slightly archaic, but is fully acceptable.

4.

A comparison of South African and Australian settlement history is enlightening (cf. Lanham and McDonald 1979:90-2). The early settlers of both colonies came from the same regions and classes (even though South Africa was, of course, never a penal colony). In Australia, unlike South Africa, dialectal levelling must have occurred very early, possibly spread­ ing from Sydney across the vast continent; but the details of this move­ ment, and the reasons why AusE and NZE are so similar are still not clear. Again in contrast to the situation in South Africa, where the English-speaking whites are a minority within a minority, a local (spoken) norm of AusE became acceptable when political and cultural indepen­ dence began to develop from the early 20th century.

4. Values and new norms Even native colonial English, where it differed from London usage, was commonly regarded as 'erroneous, corrupted, not respectable'. The list of such negative judgements is particularly long and impressive for AmE, and one might

1 Forms and functions of English around the world

19

perhaps select as particularly interesting the caustic evaluation of AmE by the Scotsman Witherspoon (in Mathews 1931:17), who criticised American devi­ ances in much the same way as Scotticisms had been castigated and purged by educated Scots during the 18th-century Edinburgh Enlightenment. Similar judgements are found in Pettman (1913) on the subject of the English spoken in South Africa: It gives an Englishman, who loves the sentence that is lucid and logical, a shock to hear his native tongue maltreated by those who are just as English in blood as himself. Even Edward Morris, who saw his Austral English as a complement to the OED, thought it necessary to defend the words listed in his dictionary against the criticism of vprecisians': It may be thought by some precisians that all Australasian English is a corruption of the language. So too is Anglolndian, and pace Mr. Brander Matthews, there are such things as Americanisms, which were not part of the Elizabethan heritage, [...] When we hear railing at slang phrases, at American­ isms, some of which are admirably expressive, at various flowers of colonial speech, and at words woven into the texture of our speech by those who live far away from London and from Oxford, and who on the outskirts of the British Empire are brought into contact with new natural objects that need new names, we may think for our comfort on the undoubted fact that the noble and dignified language of the poets, authors and preachers, grouped around Lewis XIV., sprang from debased Latin. [...] It is too late a day to close the doors against new words. This Austral English Dictionary merely catalogues and records those which at certain doors have already come in. (Morris 1898:xvi)

The linguistic independence of AmE was established in the 19th century, that of AusE/NZE in the 20th. However, acceptance of local norms in AusE was restricted to pronunciation and lexis, and a few features in spelling and gram­ mar: AusE/NZE (and SAfE) norms of educated usage leaned on prescriptive models à la Fowler well into the 20th century. In the multilingual countries Canada and South Africa the situation is more complex. Canada (outside the francophone areas) bears the stamp of both British immigrants and American Royalists. The feeling of endangered independence, with a huge neighbour looming large from the South, has always strengthened the British element and certainly contributed to the proclamation of CanE as a distinct entity (e.g. through the efforts of Avis).11 11

Avisstressed the distinctive character of CanE in a great number of articles (Avis 1978) and in a series of dictionaries published by Gage, Toronto. For sober summaries of the question see Bailey (1982), Görlach (1987b/1991a), and contributions to Clarke (1993).

20

1 Forms and functions of English around the world

Many of the 1.5 million English-speaking South Africans, barred from political power after 1948, and with the somewhat uncertain future of the country in view, were bound to have difficulty in defining their role (and that of English) in a new South Africa. Perhaps it is this uncertainty (not confined to linguistic matters) that has led to unswerving loyalty to British norms. What the English of the future will be like when it has, perhaps, merged with Afrikaans-coloured English and Black English it is difficult to imagine.12 New norms also develop through the 'export' of new varieties: native AmE partly forms the basis of Hawaiian and Liberian English; ESL in the Philippines is modelled on 20th-century AmE. Since 1945, AmE has increasingly influenced EFL varieties outside the former British Empire, e.g. in Japan, Thailand or in Arab countries. Finally, it interferes with BrE in Australia and the Caribbean, and its impact on certain domains and registers, for example in the media (newspapers, radio, television and films) and in pop music is world-wide. The linguistic independence of New Englishes in ESL countries is even more difficult to achieve than that of ENL varieties. Even today a large number of Indian students regard BrE as their model (and some still believe they speak BrE).13 The government of Singapore denied the existence of SgE as a local norm (but cf. Platt 1982, Gupta 1986 and Gopinathan et al 1994), while Sey (1973:10) was realistic in his summary of the attitudes of his educated countrymen towards local forms of English: The linguist may be able to isolate features of Ghanaian English and describe them. But once these are made known to him, the educated Ghanaian would strive to avoid them altogether. The surest way to kill Ghanaian English, if it really exists, is to discover it and make it known.

The social history of pidgins and creoles makes it clear that attitudes towards these forms of speech are commonly even more negative: many speakers of such varieties (at least when research began in the 1960s) could not understand why scholars were interested in such 'broken speech'. A comparison of the number of theses written in West Africa and India on Shakespeare or Milton with the figures for serious studies of local forms of English (or pidgins) still reflects the very hesitant acceptance of these — as means of communication or as objects of scholarly research. 12

The development of the forms and functions of English and attitudes towards it must be rewritten for the 1990s; for recent trends see de Klerk (fc). vCf. Kachru (1982a:373); this does not exclude the possibility that English in internal use (by Indians for Indians) should be recognisably Indian — speech forms too close to the British model are considered inappropriately formal or presumptuous in many contexts.

1 Forms and functions of English around the world

21

5. English as a second and as a foreign language Moag (1982b) made the most detailed proposal so far for a classification of national uses of English. He distinguished 26 factors determining individual and societal uses without attempting to weight the factors. They can conveniently be grouped together under two headings: 1.

Acceptance: The official status of English (as of any language) can range from recognition as a national language (possibly with the aim of inte­ grating minorities using different languages) to acceptance for regional use only. It may be promoted by obligatory functions in education and the media, on traffic signs and stamps — or tolerated in the private domain, with open or tacit discouragement of official, public or all written uses. In statistics of existing language use, official statements and realistic informed guesses often diverge widely, and quantifications are precarious where attitudes and evaluations tend to bias the figures.

2.

Frequency of use: Who uses English with whom, and in what situations, on what topics, in spoken or written form? Frequency is largely deter­ mined by the extent of the role of English in education, administration and the media.

Moag suggested classifying English-using speech communities on the basis of his 26 factors as follows (here complemented by the ESD type of community): (a)

ENL = English as a native language, used for all standard and informal functions. This is the case with more than 86% of the population in Great Britain, Ireland, the USA, Australia and New Zealand; in Canada and South Africa only certain sections of the population are ENL users.

(b)

ESD = English as a second dialect. The community in which a native English-related creole coexists with St E in written uses appears, in view of its special problems, to demand a category to itself (Jamaica, Guyana, Belize — the last multilingual — and other Caribbean countries).14 It is doubtful whether extreme cases such as Sierra Leone (with Krio vs. English) or Papua New Guinea/Solomon Islands/Vanuatu (with Tok Pisin/Solomon Pijin/Bislama vs. English) should be placed in this

14

This is the classic situation for diglossia. In Europe, the historical situations in Scotland (most conspicuously in the 18th century), in Northern Germany (cf. Görlach 1985b) and in Luxemburg and German-speaking Switzerland can be compared, even though the historical foundations diverge widely.

22

1

Forms and functions of English around the world

category or whether it should be limited to cases where a continuum exists bridging the two poles of the country's linguistic spectrum. (c)

EBL = English as a basal language. Possible cases of this constellation always have an English-related creole dominated by a non-English standard. The historical successes of English (cf. 2. above), which have but rarely involved groups of English speakers under foreign rule, have restricted this situation to certain Caribbean communities (Holm 1983).

(d)

ESL = English as a second language, usually inherited from the (former) colonial administration, but retaining important functions as a supraregional language for intranational uses in education, administration and the media (Nigeria, Ghana, Kenya, India, etc.).

(e)

EFL = English as a foreign language, fulfilling only international functions, and serving as a book language in secondary and, especially, tertiary education, all other standard functions being performed by an indigenous national language (Western Europe, Japan, etc.).

This kind of neat classification into five types obviously cannot do full justice to the multiplicity of existing situations; for example, the complex pattern discernible in present-day West African countries may be summarised as follows: Cameroon: ESD in Western Cameroon for the pidgin-speaking community; ESL in other parts of Western Cameroon; EFL (realistically) in the major parts of Cameroon with French as the first foreign language; transition to EBL status in W. Cameroon is possible. Nigeria: ESL throughout, but ESD in Southern Nigeria in pidgin-using areas. Dahomey, Togo, EFL (second language: French), but some pidgin English Ivory Coast: (EBL) along the coast. Ghana: ESL (with little pidgin worth speaking of, according to Ghanaians). Liberia: ENL for a small minority along the coast, American-based, especially in Monrovia; ESD for speakers of pidgin/creole; ESL throughout the country. Sierra Leone, ESD — if Krio can be classified as a 'dialect' of English, Gambia: ESL throughout.

1 Forms and f unctions of English around the world

23

It must also be stressed that any classification can be valid only for one particular stage in a country's linguistic history: all ESL countries started as EFL ones, and political independence after 1945 has prompted many countries to select one native tongue and make it into a national language. In this context it was intended to reduce English to EFL status in India, too, an effort that was more successful in Malaysia and the Philippines, classical ESL countries until around 1970. To develop a national language so that it can be used as a modern standard for all public functions, ranging from law to the training of technicians, means that great idealistic and financial sacrifices have to be made. Such language planning has therefore been successful in only a few cases (Malaysia, the Philippines, Somalia, Tanzania and, in quite different circumstances, Israel); the chances of success were greatest straight after independence, when use could be made of anticolonial sentiments. A leader entitled 'National Language' in the Tanzanian daily The Nationalist of 5 January 1967 begins as follows: A nation without a national language is a nation without a soul. A nation with a national language which is not very much cared for is a crazy nation. Such a state of affairs cannot be tolerated in Tanzania. (Schmied 1985:60)

Even when successful, the shift to a new national language brings with it considerable problems. In Tanzania (cf. Schmied 1985, 1991), Malaysia and the Philippines, the new national language has to be taught in the schools as a second language (or a second dialect at least) to a large proportion of the pupils, which reduces the time that can now be spent on the learning of English. This means that the quality of English is changing: it is used more rarely, and while the norms aimed at may well be closer to international standards, the degree of individual competence achieved is often considerably lower. This development has caused ministries of education in Malaysia and Singapore to attempt to counteract the 'corruption of English' by employing greater numbers of nativespeaker teachers. 'Stopping the rot' is the significant phrasing of the title of an article on this phenomenon in Asia Week of 15 October 1982. Two factors favour the preservation of ESL status after independence (or at least slow down the return to EFL status): 1.

2.

Multilingualism without one dominant language: English may then be seen as a neutral compromise and therefore as politically opportune (Nigeria, India). The small size and low income of the population concerned. The full development of a national language even in monolingual countries is unlikely in cases ranging from such countries as Lesotho (1,600,000 inhabitants) to Nauru (8,000 inhabitants).

24

1 Forms and functions of English around the world

Multilingualism, small size and poverty coincide in such countries as Mauritius (official language: English; spoken: French Creole and Indian languages) or Fiji (official language: English; spoken: Fijian, Indian languages). Small size and a difficult choice between indigenous languages may even make development from ESL to ENL possible: the multilingual states of Singapore and Fiji have seen within their borders a remarkable expansion of the neutral world language with its ability to bridge the divisions caused by ethnic diversity, and English might well be accepted as the first language by the majority of their populations in the future. The schools play the most important role in the development of the ESL:EFL distinction. It is typical of ESL countries that children receive their primary education in English (so that many children never learn to read and write their mother tongue). In Africa this appears to be largely the case in Gambia, Sierra Leone, Ghana, Nigeria, Uganda, Kenya, Botswana, Swaziland and Zimbabwe (cf. Schmied 1991). But even where children are first taught in their mother tongue, knowledge of both native and foreign languages often remains deficient. This was, at least under the apartheid regime, largely the case with the Bantuspeaking Black majority of South Africa: since there was little motivation to read and write the mother tongue, the children did not attain full competence in either their Bantu language (say Xhosa) or Afrikaans or English. On the other hand, ESL countries provide many opportunities of acquiring minimal communi­ cative competence in everyday domains, learnt in unmonitored situations in the market-place or at work. EFL countries exhibit the reverse pattern: English is learnt more or less exclusively through the schools, its uses within the country are very limited, and it functions virtually only as a means of international communication and as a book language. Percentages or absolute numbers of speakers of English are, then, not the proper way to distinguish between ESL and EFL countries15 — the proportion 15

I here refrain from giving estimates of my own; the varying numbers of speakers given (especially for ESL/EFL countries) appear to be the result of (a) inadequate investigation and (b) failure to define what a statement like 'Mr X speaks English' should be understood to mean. Serious statistics ought to contain detailed analyses of when and where speakers of English make use of their competences; these investigations can then serve to account for stages of progressive language shift, as illustrated by the analysis made by Platt (1982:391) — whereas the study published by Tay (1982), though it is exemplarily diligent in other respects, lacks the statistics which are so vital for multilingual Singapore. If prognostications are at all possible, it appears that the number of ESL speakers will become smaller as a consequence of emerging national languages, but that the number of EFL speakers is likely to grow as a consequence of the expansion of secondary education (and possibly of recruiting

1 Forms and functions of English around the world

25

of speakers of English is likely to be higher in Western Europe than it is in India for example. It is, rather, the actual use of the language in native contexts that separates ESL countries from EFL ones. 6. How many varieties of English? With the preceding discussions in mind, one might now ask whether it is possible to determine how many distinctive Englishes there are. Whether a speech form can be regarded as a dialect of English is an open question in the case of European varieties such as Scots (formerly a quasi-independent language) or Anglo-Romani (a relexified English used by English Travellers). Similar problems with classification also arise for English-related pidgins and creoles world-wide. The criteria of linguistic distance from English, expansion of the range of uses, and (incipient) standardisation make a decision easy for the languages of Surinam (Sranan, Saramaccan, Djuka) and of the Southwestern Pacific (Tok Pisin, Solomon Pijin, Bislama, Australian Kriol) as well as for Krio in Sierra Leone: even though there are unmistakably English components in all these, their modern forms must be classified as independent languages. A decision is much more difficult in cases with continua bridging the poles of basilect and close-to-standard acrolect, as found in Jamaica or Southern Nigeria. It seems legitimate to treat these modern varieties, frequently in advanced stages of decreolisation (i.e. of closing the gap between them and St E), as dialects of English — however differently their 18th- or 19th-century predecessors would have been classified.16 How many separate varieties ought to be distinguished within what is undoubtedly 'English' cannot be conclusively decided (nor can the question of how many dialects of English there are in England). However, the question is not purely an academic game, because it forces the scholar to list the defining characteristics of the postulated variety and thereby to show whether a label such as 'Indian English' can be accepted as a linguistic term or whether some non-committal designation such as 'English in India' is preferable. Mühlhäusler (1985) has analysed the pidgins of the Southwest Pacific to show what criteria can serve to differentiate related or similar varieties and to

among speakers breaking away from French). The important, but vast and complex field of ESP 'English for special purposes' is here neglected. 16 Todd (1982) presents an excellent survey of the Englishes coexisting in Cameroon (book and accompanying cassette).

26

1 Forms and functions of English around the world

demonstrate how contradictory criteria stand in the way of satisfactory solutions to the problem. Factors obviously involved are: 1. 2. 3. 4.

the degree of standardisation in the spoken and written forms; prestige, and users' awareness of speaking a particular language; range of uses; linguistic distance from the historical 'ancestor' (e.g. from BrE) and from neighbouring varieties.

Features from various linguistic levels are, of course, involved in classifying an individual variety. A very raw and simplifying classification17 on the basis of phonetic/phonemic features alone is provided by Trudgill and Hannah (1982:5):

Key 1. lœ.l rather than /æ/ in path etc. 2. absence of non-prevocalic Id 3. close vowels for /æ/ and /ε/, monophthongisation of /ai/ and /aul 4. front [a:] for la:l in part etc. 5. absence of contrast of / / and lɔ:/ as in cot and caught 6. /æ/ rather than lœ.l in can't etc. 7. absence of contrast of / / and lœ.l as in bother and father 8. consistent voicing of intervocalic /it 9. unrounded [a] in pot 10. syllabic /r/ in bird 11. absence of contrast of /υ/ and /u:/ as in pull and poo/ 17 Features of quite a few dialects tally with those of other dialects rather than with the superordinate variety. Thus the homophony of cot.caught, found in Canada, N. Ireland and Scot­ land does not apply to all dialects of these regions nor, on the other hand, is it restricted to speakers from these areas. Simplified contrastive analyses such as the graph reproduced here also conflict with the insight of sociolinguists (like Trudgill), that it is often the frequency of features that is characteristic of individual varieties rather than their total presence or absence.

1 Forms and functions of English around the world

27

The four cases below may be adduced to exemplify the problems of classi­ fication: A.

Is there such an entity as 'Canadian English'? As mentioned above, scholars agree that the degree of homogeneity and distinctiveness of the English now existing in Canada is not sufficient to allow 'CanE' to be delimited on purely linguistic grounds. Dialectologists before 1965 never questioned that Canadian forms of English should be treated within the framework of North American English, and the inde­ pendence of CanE postulated by many linguists since Avis seems to be contradicted by the sociolinguistic facts: the more US-oriented speech of the younger generation and of the normative region of central Ontario in general indicates that there is an ongoing process levelling the few remaining distinctions in speech north and south of the border (cf. Bailey 1982, Chambers 1986, Görlach 1987b, Clarke 1993).

B.

Is there a West African (or Pan-African) English?18 West African communities with ESL (or EFL) and possibly an indigenous PE (cf. 5. above) use individual mixtures and regional conventions composed from the following factors: 1. the degree of users' competence/fluency ranging from minimal/broken to fluent/perfect; 2. the combination of PE and English, or creole and English; 3. AmE or BrE as historical norms; 4. ethnic differences in English/in the use of English, reflecting different mother tongues; 5. national differences (e.g., a 'NigE' possibly forming part of a larger entity, describable as 'WAfE'). The present state of research does not appear to permit clear classification of existing speech forms as well-defined 'varieties' (cf. Görlach 1984a) nor indeed any prognostications about a future WAfE norm. However, Jibril (1986) has shown that a levelling process is in progress in Nigeria, which might well lead to a NigE standard.

18

Cf. the detailed summary in Görlach (1984a). Angogo & Hancock (1980), Hancock & Angogo (1982) and Bokamba (1982) tend to suggest that an 'AfE' exists or is likely to evolve, but the close linguistic contacts and political-economic unification of anglophone African countries which would be the necessary conditions of greater linguistic homogenisation are obviously lacking. For a comprehensive survey also cf. Schmied (1991).

28

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Forms and functions of English around the world

C.

Is there a South Asian English? The hypothesis that the region should be seen as a linguistic whole, also in the description of its ESL forms, seems reasonable — but SAsE has not been properly described so far, nor have its subvarieties been properly delimited: what is the relation between the IndE ≠ Lankan English con­ trast on the one hand and forms influenced by a common L1, such as the Tamil' English found in both India and Sri Lanka on the other? (The assumption that national distinctions exist is plausible in this case, since the colonial history of the two states has been so different, and English has played different roles in each since independence, too.)

D.

What is the (systemic) difference between AusE and NZE? All scholars (and all native speakers) agree that AusE is exceptionally homogeneous (and that variation mainly depends on sociolect and style). Many features of the English of New Zealand are similar to or identical with AusE ones, a fact that can only be partly explained by settlement history. Most Australians claim that they can identify NZE (and vice versa) — but a coherent description of NZE, and its differences from AusE (and possible 20th-century convergence) remains to be written (in spite of Bauer 1986, 1994b, Bell & Holmes 1990, and the more popular account by Gordon & Deverson 1985).

7. Challenges to linguistic theory It will have become apparent that dealing with varieties of world English poses problems of theory and method that are largely unsolved, but which must not stop us from attempting descriptions. Some of the basic assumptions of older or more recent grammarians which are based on European languages and uses in more or less monolingual societies are obviously not applicable to, for instance, English in Africa: 1.

Not all speakers have an obvious native language because they grew up using more than one language, or because a second language (such as NigPE) became dominant in early childhood. Moreover, such speakers are less able to judge the acceptability of utterances — or even to classify them as realisations of one particular language. This does not seem to be possible for them even in the case of widely divergent linguistic systems, let alone where the systems have become mixed (as is the case in Kupwar, India, according to Gumperz and Wilson's classic description of 1971), or where elements of two languages occur in apparently irregular code-mixing. The distinction becomes even more precarious if two similar

1 Forms and functions of English around the world

29

languages are involved, as with pidgins and their related European languages. 2.

The concept of 'speech community', difficult to define even in western societies considered monolingual, becomes useless in multilingual situations. Even a widening of the concept of 'competence' to include communicative competence and a refining of the methods of description (by the identification of grammatical variables and the use of statistical methods in the description) lead to fundamental problems. Thus Daswani (1978) complains that there is no systematic description of IndE in which it is contrasted with BrE: a list of details (deviances, additions, losses, gaps) does not constitute a description, especially since the geographical and social distribution of individual phenomena is normally not investi­ gated. Apart from the problem of deciding which speakers of English in India can be regarded as speakers of IndE (so that a description could be based on data collected from them), there is also the question of how to accommodate apparently irregular features within a systematic analysis. For instance, deviance in the use of the articles can be accounted for neither by subclassifying nouns according to their semantic-syntactic features nor as interference from Indian languages in any way that would make their distribution predictable.

As for the correlation of linguistic data with social reality, there are now large numbers of sociolinguistic investigations of western communities so that methods and results can be evaluated (cf. the very critical summary in Hudson 1980:138-90). However, of Third World communities only Singapore appears to have been treated adequately so far (Piatt 1982, Gopinathan et al. 1994). A promising start on the quantification of southern and northern pronunciations in NigE was made by Jibril (1986) and by many papers in Cheshire (1991), but the number of studies is not sufficient to permit any judgement of the applicability of their methods to other cases or of what modifications might be necessary. It may be significant that Lanham (1982) claimed that he was providing a Labovian analysis, while in his social history of SAfE he, in fact, used only a few Labovian concepts, and that R.B. Le Page — after thirty years of work on the sociolinguistic description of language use in multilingual societies in the Caribbean (mainly St Lucia and Belize) — came to the conclusion that a satis­ factory method is still not in sight (Le Page 1980, but now cf. his major con­ tribution to the problem in Le Page & Tabouret-Keller 1985). What is needed are new theoretically well-founded descriptions of language contact and multilingualism as individual and societal phenomena, of the rules

30

1 Forms and functions of English around the world

governing code-switching, of models for learners' interim grammars of the target language, and finally evidence of the extent to which quantitative analyses can be expected to be fruitful. 8. The genesis of ESL varieties Kachru (1983:4) quotes a statement by Dustoor which in content and form19 impressively illustrates the consequences of the transplanting of English to Indian surroundings: (1)

Our mental climate will always foster plants that do not flourish in England or America; and such plants, just because they are somewhat exotic, add to the charm of a garden. All lovers of English will, therefore, encourage them to grow in the world-wide garden of English. It is only the weeds, which spring up whenever ignorance, carelessness or pretentiousness infects the air, that need to be pulled up by the roots.

Settlers' ENLs and overseas ESLs have to use (and where necessary modify) the lexicon of what was initially a purely European language to refer to the objects and ideas of new situations and cultures: phenomena such as lexical expansion by way of new meanings, new word-formations and loanwords are consequently common to both ENL and ESL varieties. However, the similarities end here: whereas settlers' languages continue to develop the full range of stylistic choices that the immigrants brought with them, ESLs depend on the texts chosen for use in language teaching either haphazardly or from a limited range of preferred registers, or on what is considered important in unmonitored language acquisition (cf. ch. 2). This limited input has problematic consequences for the use of English in various domains: the range of styles acquired is limited — traditionally literary English from the texts of English classical writers (Shakespeare, Milton, the Authorised Version of the Bible, Victorian novels and poems), registers from public domains such as administration and legislature or jurisdiction, and increasingly in recent years the English of newspapers and radio, films and pop I9

The following specimens, examples 1-6, manifest nativisation of English in the form of unusual metaphors, non-British collocations and meanings. However, deviant syntax is quite rare (since this would be regarded as unacceptable and 'need to be pulled up by the roots', example 1). The transition from texts 1-4 to 5-6 is blurred: here the foreign content leads to deviant expressions, mainly in word-formation or meaning. By contrast, English-related pidgins and creoles from the Caribbean, West Africa or the Southwest Pacific exhibit struc­ tural divergence in phonology, lexis and syntax. However, the problems of pidgin and creole languages (for which cf. Holm 1988-89, Mühlhäusler 1986) are outside the scope of the present article; I therefore do not give illustrative texts and analyses.

Í

Forms and functions of English around the world

31

music — often without learners being aware of register differences. This explains the frequent uncertainty in stylistic matters and (from an ENL point of view) register misuse. A particularly obvious instance of this is the traditional use of a grandiloquent style in everyday contexts, the penchant for the florid and the preference for a Latinate vocabulary, which has long been observed in, for instance, India and West Africa, a tendency reinforced by the prestige tradition­ ally attaching to elaborate diction in native Indian and West African languages. Passages from a football report (Cameroon 1979) and from a popular novel belonging to the Onitsha Market literature (Nigeria 1972) may serve to illustrate such phenomena: (2)

How for goodness sake the team we saw last Sunday lost 0:3 to the Guineans is hard to fathom. Once more, Cameroon fell by the way side in the African Nations football tournament. Our only consolation is that we seem to organize better for club competitions than for national tournaments. May be that is a virtue. Then so be it [...] Milla gave his team all that they could hope for: he is a subtle thinker and a tactician in his own right. His game as a striker relies on stealth rather than strength, and man, he can take diabolical chances even when the chances initially appear hopeless to an onlooker. Milla is quick, flexible and versatile. His three goals were scored under such tricky and cheap situations that it looked easy even to a neophyte. The penalty aside, Milla was worthy of his hire [...] Indeed, it was a pirate victory last Sunday. But Cameroon is used to such circumstances. In 1972, when Cameroon organized the 8th African Nations Cup, Congo nipped victory just when the public was celebrating ... (from Todd 1982:37-9)

(3)

She was in her maiden form and remained untampered with, since her generate days. Even to meddle with her zestful glamour of beauty, nobody had ever succeeded. The grim enthusiasm of her ardent lust was bubbling on her romantic face, and her youthful glances of shyness. She had got all the zests of the West and mettled her senses, to bolster up alacrity, to crack love, romance and joke, up to their highest mediocre of acme. It was a day for love maniacs to come and a day for Rosemary to travel too. (Miller O. Albert, Rosemary and the Taxi-Driver, from Obiechina 1972:135)

Possibly even more significant in this context is the following passage of scholarly expository prose, the content of which is also relevant to the points made here:

32 (4)

1

Forms and functions of English around the world

Creative writing is altogether a different matter, however. As is widely accepted, creative writing has a unique self-identificational and self-expressive value for the community which begets it, providing for its people a means of exploring themselves and discovering who they most distinctively are, and of giving a special satisfying kind of expression to their most vital thoughts and feelings and experiences. If this is true, then it will not be too difficult to see that the switch is bound to have fatal consequences. The system that these writers turn so carelessly away from is that which is interwoven with the very pith and marrow of their unique symbiotic lives. For them to shake off the distinctive forms and rhythms of the everyday speech which expresses the system is, thus, to debilitate themselves, to cut their writing off disastrously from the very source of its life and vitality, impoverishing it and rendering it artificial, sterile, anaemic. To make matters worse, the formal academic standard with which they replace it keeps them too consciously preoccupied with scholarly norms of grammar and conectness to allow them to truly relax and come into their own in such writing. (Kandiah 1981:75-6)

Kachru (1982c:325ff.) mentions the following types of texts (using Indian speci­ mens), which are said to show signs of linguistic adaptation (nativisation, indigenisation) as a consequence of contextualisation in Indian communicative patterns: reviews, matrimonial advertisements, obituaries, invitations, letters and acknowledgements (e.g. in prefaces). This list was compiled empirically and not analytically, and it would be interesting to see to what extent the type of text determines the degree of adaptation and whether Kachru's Indian list is paral­ lelled by texts from other ESL cultures: a comparative analysis of various types of text from different parts of the world is an urgent desideratum. Compare the matrimonial advertisements from India quoted in ch. 7 and an obituary from Nigeria (1981) to illustrate various forms of nativisation: (5)

IN MEMORIAM In cherished and affectionate memory of our devoted, kind and industrious mother, aunt and grandmother. MADAM LYSTER BENE WOKOMA who was translated into transition on the 1st day of January, 1973. Mother, eight years have rolled by without your loving presence. Although the blow was hard and the grief too great to bear, our consolation lies in the belief that your soul is now forever with the Almighty who understands every­ thing. Your place in the family will forever remain vacant; we pray to the Almighty to give you perfect rest until we meet to part no more. MR F.M. EFEREBO MRS IBIERE I. PRINCEWILL (for the family)

1 Forms and functions of English around the world

33

Categories gained from an analysis of texts that have not been systematically collected are unlikely to represent the full range of adaptations, Richards (1982) has claimed that the transfer of native principles of textual structure and of paralinguistic features of communication is the most characteristic type of deviance in ESL texts (cf. Y. Kachru 1995). Indeed such features, which are less susceptible to monitoring and conscious correction, remain remarkably stable even generations after a language shift has occurred within a speech community (cf. 'Africanisms' in CarE). Adaptations to suit ESL communicative needs are, then, necessary and to be expected. Kachru's statement on the subject ought, therefore, to be self-evident and not in need of any apology: "Indianisms in Indian English are, then, linguistic manifestations of pragmatic needs for appropriate language use in a new linguistic and cultural context" (1983:2). However, linguistic insights and postulates derived from them do not match social reality. The linguist is certainly not some kind of language referee who can make grammatical deviance from a foreign norm acceptable, i.e. turn the 'mistakes' of a prescriptive tradition into permissible alternatives on the grounds that they are the consequences of necessary adaptation. 9. Literature written in a second language The use of English for literary purposes is an important, but often exaggerated, function of the world language; however, works written by local authors on local themes for local audiences in local forms of English illustrate how far nativisation has proceeded in many ESL countries. Obviously the kind of features mentioned can occur in quite unexpected distributions: many works are still written with an eye to a London publisher, who may regard the use of local Englishes (or even pidgins) as incorrect English and at best permit a diluted form of local English to give the work a certain local flavour. A fundamental distinction must also be made between ENL literature in, say, Australia and ESL writings, where the English at the command of writers and intended local audiences may permit only a narrow range of stylistic options, and the transfer of English to new subject matter and different narrative traditions may call for commensurate stylistic adaptation. Such experiments have been most plentiful in West Africa and India, and it is no coincidence that these are regions which have important literatures in local languages, and in which spoken forms of English have diverged far from London standards. (The Caribbean region is particularly important for its use of creole languages for literary purposes, and there are various texts in Krio or NigPE, too.) The independence of literary

34

1 Forms and functions of English around the world

forms of ESL has been stressed by Chinua Achebe in a much-quoted passage (1975:61): The African writer should aim to use English in a way that brings out his message best without altering the language to the extent that its value as a medium of international exchange will be lost. He should aim at fashioning out an English which is at once universal and able to carry his peculiar experience. I have in mind here the writer who has something nev/, something different to say. The nondescript writer has little to tell us, anyway, so he might as well tell it in conventional language and get it over with.

In practice such writing, placed as it is between two cultures and languages, creates great problems. An author has a number of different forms of adaptation to choose from: 1. 2. 3.

4.

He can employ a native literary form, which may include the use of textual and narrative structures diverging from those of BrE. He can use throughout a local variety of English, which is deviant in spelling, syntax and vocabulary. He can use coexisting local varieties for dialogue only, the speech forms serving to characterise personae as individuals and as members of particular social and regional speech communities. He can freely transfer structures from native languages to his English; this process may include deliberate 'mistakes' or comprise the creation of an entirely new literary diction.

All this shows that literary texts (not only from ESL literatures!) must be treated with the utmost caution if used as corpora for linguistic analysis; but if inter­ preted with circumspection, they can provide valuable data for establishing both linguistic structures and language attitudes (cf. Görlach 1983). This applies even to parodies such as that by R. Parthasarathy quoted in ch. 7, which is very successful if the stereotypes are recognised and correctly interpreted by Indians and Europeans alike. (It should be unnecessary to say that such interpretation must also precede literary analysis.) Even expository prose (such as Kandiah' s above — and the structure of the complete article as originally submitted) is often fully comprehensible only within a non-English tradition. It is obvious that such differences in the structure and function of texts involve basic problems of intelligibility which have not, however, attracted much scholarly attention until recently. If such independence is possible (and desirable) in ESL writing, could similar adaptation be permitted in EFL countries? Since these have a foreign norm, usually that of the ENL country closest in geographical or historical terms, the

1 Forms and functions of English around the world

35

kind of development that takes place in ESL communities appears to be impos­ sible at first sight. However, certain local usage preferences within the norm indicate that EFL speakers exploit the range of existing choices differently from native speakers, and even this alone can be interpreted as a form of nativisation. The following factors may be regarded as symptomatic: 1.

2.

3. 4.

Loanwords in the contact languages involved are indicators of lexical and semantic preferences; it is likely that these will also be preferred when speakers switch to English. Two types of syntactic structures are likely to be preferred: those which have equivalents in the native language, and those which are frequent in English. Textual and stylistic features and expectations are likely to be transferred to English. Reference to non-English objects is necessarily expressed by extension of meanings and by new coinages (as in ENL/ESL communities).

These considerations hardly permit one to speak of 'German English' or a 'West European variety of English' in the way one may speak of IndE, but descriptional models will have to be found to deal with such deviant language use that does not involve conflicts with native-speaker grammatical norms. 10. Consequences for English language teaching What kind of English should, then, be taught and what methods employed? Wong (1982:264) rightly stresses the chasm that exists between the age-old efforts to teach native-speaker English in ESL countries and linguistic reality. A solution to this dilemma is difficult in view of: 1. 2. 3. 4.

budgetary constraints causing classes with too many pupils, inadequate teaching materials, and badly trained and badly paid teachers, which results in uses of English diverging further and further from the proclaimed norm, while the demand for a knowledge of English is unabated — because of its high prestige, job requirements within the country, and its usefulness abroad after emigration.

Only two solutions appear to be feasible:

36

1.

2.

1 Forms and f unctions of English around the world

Either English is taught only to those who can prove that they need it; however, to decide who does is impossible, and any selection would produce new social inequality and injustice; or an effort is made to teach the form of English that is accessible to learners in their own particular circumstances.

The reflections presented here mesh with the ongoing discussion on English as an international auxiliary language. After all, English is in a much better position than other natural languages (being more widespread and having, in certain aspects, a simpler grammar) and than artificial languages (learners being able to expand their knowledge to achieve full integrative competence, permit­ ting them to participate in one of the richest cultures in the world). It might be possible to get linguists to agree on what kind of simplification of English should be aimed at in order to make the language easier to learn. For instance, a core vocabulary surrounded by concentric spheres of an expanded general vocabulary or sectors of special terminologies (ESP) — could be defined by scientific methods; such things have been done by the staffs of dictionary and school-book publishers. It may well be of decisive importance to avoid the word 'auxiliary' or 'vehicular', and to allay any suspicion on the part of learners that such language planning is a neocolonial plot to fob them off with a second-rate variety of English. Such fears, which are easy to understand in view of the colonial past and of continuing political and economic dependence, must be taken very seriously if any language planning in this direction is to be success­ ful. A solution respecting the interests of ESL/EFL users would appear feasible on the lines suggested by Wong (1982:261-86). It is significant that she quotes Kachru, with whom she fully agrees: It is obvious that in the Third World countries the choice of functions, uses and models of English has to be determined on a pragmatic basis, keeping in view the local conditions and needs. It will, therefore, be appropriate that the native speakers of English abandon the attitude of linguistic chauvinism and replace it with an attitude of linguistic tolerance. The strength of the English language is in presenting the Americanness in its American variety, and the Englishness in its British variety. Let us, therefore, appreciate and encourage the Third World varieties of English too. The individuality of the Third World varieties, such as the Indianness in its Indian variety, is contributing to the linguistic mosaic which the speakers of the English language have created in the English speaking world. The attitude toward these varieties ought to be one of appreciation and understanding. (263)

However, the practical difficulties of the proposal should not be neglected:

1 Forms and functions of English around the world

1.

2. 3.

37

Attitudes towards New Englishes would have to change, in particular in the countries affected. More than hitherto, it would be necessary to accept that degree of individual competence in English appropriate to the communicative needs of the individual user. Local usage would have to be codified in order to permit teachers to distinguish between mistakes and acceptable local features of English. Necessary conditions would be that (a) international intelligibility is retained as far as possible, though without creating conflicting norms of international vs. national (regional) Englishes; (b) the denotative and communicative ranges of English are impaired as little as possible.

This kind of language planning, which takes better account of existing regional diversity would not lead to a fully homogeneous world language — but since fluency in and frequency of use of local Englishes would increase, intelligibility, even internationally, would not be likely to suffer. 11. Conclusion English as a World Language is still not a properly demarcated scholarly discipline employing well-defined terms within a theory developed for the purpose.20 Indeed, it is doubtful whether such methodological foundations are necessary for an interdisciplinary subject, especially in view of the long list of desiderata which must be met before a theory proper can evolve. As a subdis­ cipline of English Studies, a consideration of English as a world language would 20

Three recent suggestions will have to be tested for the contribution they can possibly make to a more adequate description of the forms and functions of New Englishes: 1.

2.

3.

Gupta (1994) strongly argues against an identification of SgE with imperfectly learnt St E, or a variety to be analysed contrastively, as compared with an international (or BrE, AmE) norm. She claims that SgE is a dialect of English "best analysed in its own terms" (1994:124). Y. Kachru (1995) sees "Contrastive rhetoric" as the appropriate tool to explain differences "of the writing conventions of various languages and cultures as they differ from the perceived norm of writing in AmE and BrE" (1995:21). She sets out to refine Kaplan's methods first suggested in the 1960s and to explain a central aspect of 'nativized Englishes'. Less promising is Dasgupta's (1993) attempt at fusing western sociolinguistics and Indian traditions to explain the Otherness' of IndE: the methods suggested deliberately avoid strict systematization, which makes his postulates difficult to verify, and certainly precludes comparisons with other Englishes.

38

1 Forms and functions of English around the world

provide an ideal opportunity to expand the social, historical and geographical aspects of English Studies — and it will hardly be necessary to point out that partial reorientation along these lines might well serve to enhance the appeal of a traditional and somewhat ageing discipline.

POSTAGE STAMP INSCEIPTIONS. A Few More. THE new Canadian penny stamp bears the modest motto, " We hold a Vaster Empire than has been." This suggests boundless possibilities in the way of bumptious inscriptions on stamps· Here are some crude ideas :— For Englænd. We are richer than Anybody. We are Tremendous Swells. The Policeman outside the Mansion House is the finest in the World. There are more Faddists in England than in any other Country. Our Fleet can smash all the rest. Mind your Eye 1 By Jingo, if we do ! 1 ! Go to J ericho 1 There are more Omnibuses in London than anywhere. One of our Journals has the Largest Circulation in the World. We have a Prime Minister who is bigger than any other. We had a Leader of the Opposition of similar Stature. ... For the United States. We lick Creation.

INNOVATION IN NEW ENGLISHES 1

1. Introduction 1.1. Innovation and conservatism Innovation and retention, convergence and divergence, dialectalization of lan­ guages and the emergence of new ones, morphological simplification and the development of new inflectional and derivational patterns are opposing ten­ dencies evident in the history of most individual languages. Of course, there are periods when specific communicational demands, restricted or expanding func­ tions of the language, its stigmatisation or growing prestige make the pendulum swing more to one of the two extremes, but such tendencies can be reversed: for instance, an almost total loss of inflectional morphology in pidgins in their initial phases can be complemented by newly developed inflectional categories (indigenous or borrowed) in their later (possibly creole) stages. Since these tendencies are near-universal, it comes as no surprise to find that observers remarked upon them at an early date, as Horace does with regard to lexis in his Art of Poetry (here quoted in Puttenham's translation of 1589, cf. Görlach 1991b:240): Many a world yfalne shall eft arise And such as now bene held in hiest prise will fall as fast, when vse and custome will[,] onely vmpiers of speach, for force and skill.

In what follows, I will concentrate on deliberate innovation caused by, and adducible to, the requirements of successful communication. I will therefore largely neglect the discussions of why linguistic change ('innovation' in a

'The paper was read as a guest lecture at various universities; questions from the audiences have been most helpful. The article is here reprinted from English World-Wide 15 (1994), 101-26,

40

2

Innovation in New Englishes

different definition) happens, how and why changes are actuated, and how they spread within the speech community.2 In what follows I will distinguish the traditional groups of varieties of Eng­ lish, based on types of speech communities, namely ENL, ESD, ESL, and con­ trast them with EFL conditions; I will look at the evidence on the individual linguistic levels, but concentrate on lexis. Pron/phon

Orth

+

ESD

+

-

(+)

(+)

ESL

+

-

(+)

(+)

_

_

Figure 1:

+

)

Synt

ENL

EFL

(

Infl -

-

_

Loan +

_

Wofo Mean Prag +

+

+

+

(+)

+

+

+

(+)

+

+

_

(+)

(+)

Expected degrees of innovation by types of speech communities and linguistic levels. (Note that EFL contact phenomena in the receptor language, as in franglais, are not considered).

1.2. Conservatism The conservative character of dialects exported overseas, or at least transported any great distance from the heartland of the original speech community, has often been commented on. There appears to be a quasi-scholarly expectation that emigrant speakers will diverge the more, as the result of stagnation, the further away they are from the home country, the smaller the group is, and the longer the emigrant community has been away. As is the case with all such conceptions, there is an element of truth in this assumption, too: Sprachinsel dialects often do retain features that have been lost in more mainstream speech communities. 19th-century dialectologists looking for historical evidence useful for reconstructing earlier or allegedly purer forms of the language they were studying made a special effort to collect material from peripheral dialects or languages, whether this came from isolated German-speaking communities in Italy or Russia, Romance languages like Sardinian or Rumanian, or English

2

The classic origin of this modern tradition is the article by Weinreich, Labov and Herzog (1968), but other scholars like Coseriu (1974), Lass (1980) and most recently J. Milroy (1992) have contributed to the discussion, modifying the arguments originally put forward; Labov himself has continued his lifelong interest in documenting the social meaning of lin­ guistic change (cf. Labov 1980, 1994).

2 Innovation in New Englishes

41

dialects in Ireland. In fact, as early as 1577 Stanyhurst remarked on the conser­ vative dialect of county Wexford: Howbeit to this daie, the dregs of the old ancient Chaucer English are kept as well there as in Fingall (cf. Görlach 1991b:383),

and then went on to prove his point by quoting nine words that had been lost from contemporary English, but were known from Chaucer and retained in the isolated Anglo-Irish community. Similar claims as to the particularly archaic character of the local English were made for Scotland (cf. Görlach 1990b: 125) and especially for America from the 19th century onwards. One of the most widespread textbooks on AmE, Marckwardt & Dillard (1958, 21980), has an entire chapter devoted to 'Colonial Lag', a term not invented by Marckwardt, but one which has certainly popularized the notion of the conservative, if not backward, character of AmE. However, even if conservative features are found in colonial, extraterritorial or peripheral varieties, they need not be prominent. In fact, as I have tried to show in my "Colonial lag?" paper (Görlach 1987a), innovation is much more conspicuous than conservatism in the speech of such communities, so that it is, rather, the home countries that are actually lagging behind.3 The fact that Americans so vociferously claimed to be the preservers of undefiled Elizabethan English can probably be explained as a defensive measure directed against those who — then as now — argued that "America will be the death of English". The alleged lag is likely to be explained by Americans as a clever invention of the British, who decided that looking down on the colonials in education and morals must include criticism of their speech.4 However, those who would like to claim 16th-century Wexford English as an exemplary case of conservatism, should also read the preceding paragraph, where Stanyhurst remarks quite explicitly:

3

Such a statement is more or less an accepted tenet in traditional dialectology, phrased in almost axiomatic form by Carver: Unless drastic social or other changes have occurred, the source area will usually conserve more of the original lexicon than its settlement areas, which have additional competing cultural forces and other regionally specific influ­ ences on the language [...]. (1987:17) 4

As Kytö (1991) has shown, Early AmE differs slightly from BrE in the frequency of some modals, a fact which she explains as 'colonial lag', but the evidence is limited to a few modal verbs and is also slightly controversial.

2 Innovation in New Englishes

42

But in our haue made commonlie good Irish,

daies they have so aquainted themselves with the Irish, as they a mingle mangle or gallimaufreie of both the languages [...] as the inhabitants of the meaner sort speake neither good English nor (quoted from Görlach 1991b:382)

Here he points to one of the most effective causes of innovation (however criti­ cally the impact may be regarded), namely language contact. For an emigrant community to be predominantly retentive, speakers must come to a country formerly uninhabited, or with a population with whom language contact is only very marginal (as was the case with the Aborigines in Australia). There is another argument against too readily accepting conservatism or inno­ vation as a general principle governing emigrants' speech on all linguistic levels: such tendencies obviously depend, at least in part, on attitudes and speakers' intentions, and their awareness of deviating from a home-country norm. Therefore, anyone who looks at lexis will come up with results that differ from those gained by an analysis of pronunciation. In partial contrast to the generalizations that can be drawn for lexis below, it will be useful to summarize here what can be expected in new Englishes as far as pronunciation is concerned. The speech of a colonial society is likely to be characterized by the following phonological features: a)

b)

c)

There will be some kind of colonial levelling, i.e. speakers can be ex­ pected to avoid extreme dialectal pronunciations for fear of not being understood or being frowned upon.5 The melting-pot may result in new mergers or new allophonic rules where the phonetic input of colonial dialects may still be recognizable, but the distribution may be altered. (Such developments appear to have led to so-called 'Canadian Raising' and similar re-allocations of differ­ ences in diphthongs in other colonial varieties, cf. Trudgill 1986.) Since both the old and the new speech communities are likely to intro­ duce changes, but not identical ones, there is an a priori likelihood that some features of colonial pronunciation (normally a minority) will con­ tinue older speech forms superseded in the mother country.

In fact, elements from all these developments are likely to show up when the pronunciation of any colonial variety is properly analysed. Even AusE pro­ nunciation, progressive as it is in comparison with British R.P., still exhibits 5

Such developments can be strengthened by, for instance, differences in the educational systems. Kytö (1991:25) stresses that the Puritan insistence on male literacy and competence in public speech in New England "means that the common man could be expected to master a number of levels of formality in both writing and oral delivery".

2 Innovation in New Englishes

43

features of 19th-century lower-class BrE: glottal stops which became wide­ spread in Britain after the emigrants went to Australia are largely absent from lower-class AusE, which makes Australians 'lag behind' modern metropolitan Cockney. On the other hand, both of the two communities involved in a split may have gone on to introduce innovations, thus moving further apart from each other: the much-quoted case of the BrE [gla:s] vs. AmE [glæ:s] contrast is an illustration — here a third variant, the [glas] pronunciation of northern BrE, appears to be closest to the Elizabethan foundations that underlie both presentday R.P. and AmE. Syntax, inflection and lexis are much more open to corrections from a norm, including the written standard, than phonology can ever be and may therefore behave quite differently from pronunciation: obviously, then, the evidence from each of these levels must be collected and interpreted independently of the others. Moreover, conservatism and innovation have to do with both the de­ scriptive and the expressive functions of language. This fact is most easily exemplified in the case of vocabulary, where the need to designate new objects is an obvious source of lexical innovation, and the desire to be witty, creative, unusual, etc. is another. It is also quite obvious that there will be many oppor­ tunities for the first type of innovation in a foreign country, but the expressive innovations, too, may be more frequent, because more called for, in a new colonial society. Although the expressive functions of language are also evident in pronunciation and syntax (though more on the -etic and less on the -ernic level), they rarely involve denotation. As will become evident in the discussion below, it is very difficult to determine how much relevance these individual factors are to innovation, and to describe degrees of innovativeness with con­ vincing quantificational methods — a caveat even more necessary in the case of phonology than of the vocabulary. My discussion so far has been (implicitly) on mother-tongue varieties ex­ ported overseas (New Englishes of the ENL type). Communities in which English has a different status may behave quite differently as regards lag vs. innovation; in societies with English used non-natively we expect the following correlations:6 The need to refer to new objects and concepts for intranational communi­ cation is quite similar in both new ENL and ESL societies. The following dif­ ferences between ENL and ESL communities can, however, be predicted:

6

The general remarks and the discussion of word-formation largely derive from Görlach (1989b).

44

2 Innovation in New Englishes

a)

Contact with world English may have become attenuated in ESL countries after independence, i.e. there may have been less opportunity to keep up to date, which may in turn result in a certain degree of fossilization of words, meanings and concepts. 7

b)

Reduced linguistic self-confidence and the lack of a national norm for English can restrict innovation — an archaic register which is looked on as correct because it is documented in the 'best authors' may well appear to most users to be safer than experimenting with innovations not author­ ized by the model, say BrE.

c)

The restriction of English to certain domains is likely to make innovation uneven in distribution: 8 deviances will be more frequent with less formal, less educated, less norm-conscious speakers of English outside domains in which correctness can be monitored. However, 'innovations' in these varieties are likely to be looked on as mistakes if there is a chance of comparing them with native-speaker English. Note the frequent instances of deviances within the border area of word-formation, phraseology and syntax in Nihalani et al (1979). The frequency and status of the items listed in the book are, however, quite uncertain, and so it is doubtful how many (or how few) of these can be regarded as innovations.

d)

The dominance of indigenous languages in other domains, or their coexistence with English in the same functions, makes transfers or calques likely or even inevitable. Whether these are properly considered to be innovations will depend on the status of the indigenous language, speak­ ers' attitudes to transfers and mixes, and the frequency or stability of the individual items.

7

Noteworthy specimens from IndE are dickey and furlong (Nihalani et al. 1979); Jowitt (1991) lists for NigE parlour, portmanteau, quench (a light) or scholar ('student') and grammatical usages like this our, and shall is much more frequent than in any of the native Englishes. The lag can mean the survival of a word in general use (furlong is now restricted to horse-racing in BrE) or retention of an item otherwise entirely lost (dickey). 8

Cf. Jowitt's remarks for NigE: "While native-speaker lexis [...] is differentiated into various styles with recognized markers, New English lexis has a tendency to stylistic homogeneity. This means the prevalence of an abstract, impersonal, formal style [...]" (1991:129). The fact that English has been available for many generations and that videos and films provide models for colloquial English (not always of the BrE brand!) as an alternative to school English is likely to have made the problem less severe than it may have been, say, fifty years ago.

2 Innovation in New Englishes

45

By partial contrast, in ESD communities the existence of two related systems (or a continuum) in diglossic stratification and, frequently, speakers' uncertainty about clear distinctions between the systems make transfers even more likely than in ESL situations. Otherwise most of the above-mentioned criteria apply to the ESD type of society as well. The situation is completely different in EFL countries: since the norm is ex­ ternal for all but the most uneducated users of English, innovation is usually stigmatized;9 indigenous words designating national concepts are preferred to translations or paraphrases in English contexts {Bundestag rather than federal parliament), but such citation words do not become part of English and are consequently not innovations.

To summarize: it is doubtful whether lag vs. innovation can be treated in such general terms that the various types of English-using societies can be lumped together in studies of these contrasting tendencies. My investigation of word-formation in ENL:ESL:EFL societies (ch. 3 below) did not uncover any basic split within the linguistic evidence that was clearly correlated with the sociolinguistic type of community — but there were significant differences as to types and frequencies. However, it is difficult to say how far we can gener­ alize from one level of linguistic analysis, and so the data had better be treated separately, type by type. Although pidgins and creoles are historically outside English (and, even if they function in an ESD framework, are considered by many linguists to be dis­ tinct languages rather than varieties of English), the evidence from them on lag and innovation may serve to throw into perspective the interpretations gained from, in particular, ESL communities. It is obvious that the greatest distance between PCs and their related standard language is in the fields of phonology and syntax. This distance supports the case for language rather than dialect status and sets PCs apart from all the other varieties discussed in this paper. However, specifically PC features are found in the lexis as well:

9

However, this fact has not stopped EFL users in France from coining tennisman or in Germany dressman (for male model). Also, playful uses of English items in an un-English way can frequently be found, as in advertisements directed at bilingual audiences (cf. Görlach 1994a and p. 86 for telling specimens from recent German newspapers).

46

1)

2)

3)

2

Innovation in New Englishes

The general absence of derivational and inflectional morphology means that PCs have no derivational patterns available for the coining of new words, unless acquired late in the process of decreolization. The limited size of the original pidgin vocabulary of, say, a few hundred items in predominantly oral use, with restriction to certain domains and to communities of non-native speakers brings with it a wide semantic range plus a remarkable degree of semantic vagueness in individual lexical items. The PC's different syntactical structure (and absence of morphology) necessitates a far greater degree of polyfunctionality for individual words than is the case in the lexifier language. (Mühlhäusler 1979 classifies Tok Pisin words on two levels — etymology and function, that is part-ofspeech membership in the source language English and the actual use of a word in Tok Pisin utterances).

In spite of all typological divergence, PCs behave like other varieties of English when it comes to expanding their lexis to denote non-English objects of material culture (such as plants and animals etc.): speakers tend to transfer words from their native languages or make up new compounds from English elements. These compounds are normally descriptive and therefore transparent, no matter whether they are calqued on patterns in the native languages or not. 2. Innovation as an alleged characteristic of New Englishes 2.0. The phenomenon of neologisms has long been conspicuous, and remarked upon mainly by British observers when commenting on the language of 'colo­ nial societies' such as the English spoken in the United States and Australia. Such remarks refer to loanwords, new compounds and derivatives, new mean­ ings of old words, and new collocations (phraseology and grammar). 2.1. Loanwords 2.1.1. ENL varieties: AmE and SAfE The influence of other languages, in particular by lexical transfer, has always been of popular interest. This is partly because words borrowed from other languages are conspicuous in form — they may contain graphemes or phon­ emes or combinations impossible in the receptor language. The following loanwords in AmE, all taken from the kitchen, still carry their foreignness with them in spelling or pronunciation (even if partially adapted to the structure of AmE):

2 Innovation in New Englishes

47

Schnitzel, sauerkraut, smorgasbord, spaghetti, paella, borscht, hors d'oeuvre, nasi goreng, shish kebab, prosciutto, pistachio, mulligatawny. Conspicuous as loanwords such as these may be, their number and frequency has often been overstated; they constitute only a small percentage of all neo­ logisms. What is more, many loanwords disappear again, either leaving no trace, or being replaced by newly coined words. For instance, of the dozens of compounds formed to designate plants and animals containing Indian (in America) or native (in Australia) as the first element, many became established quite late, replacing an earlier loanword from an indigenous language. Appar­ ently speakers prefer a transparent word, one that 'makes sense'.10 However marginal the lexical contribution of modern European languages to AmE has been, there has at least been contact with non-English immigrants and neigh­ bourly exchange with other European cultures. Such contact was largely lacking in the first 130 years of Australian history, when the immigrant population was monochromely British ■— and linguistic and cultural contacts with Aborigines were even less frequent than they were between settlers and American Indians in the United States. Nevertheless, it was in the very early years of settlement that most words were borrowed from Aboriginal languages into AusE (cf. my map based on Dixon et al. in Görlach 1992c: 170). Some 70% of all the loanwords listed (many of which have been obsolete for some time) come from languages spoken in areas settled by 1834. It appears that there was an early point of saturation for the relatively few items bor­ rowed.11 This hypothesis is confirmed by the lexical fields in which these loanwords occur: fauna and flora greatly predominate. Although there has never been a similar geographical and semantic analysis of American Indian loanwords in AmE, it is likely that the pattern is very similar. Marckwardt (1980: 32-3) points out that early loans from Algonquian were more stable than later ones, and that half of the Indian loanwords now current were borrowed in the 17th century, and a fourth each in the 18th and 19th centuries. The situation is different again in multilingual and multiethnic South Africa. In the early periods, the English and Dutch speech communities were geo­ graphically and culturally in close contact in the Cape, and although there was 10 How little sense such words make to the biologist will be discussed with reference to koala = native bear in 2.3.2. below. 11 Note that the ratio may have been influenced by the more thorough analysis of early sources. Words adopted at an early date might make their way into the core vocabulary: "Some of them are at the heart of Australian identity, symbolically (as waratah and kanga­ roo) and emotionally (as cooee, jumbuck, humpy and dingo)", as Delbridge claims (1991:xii).

48

2 Innovation in New Englishes

a great deal of hostility between the two ethnic groups after the Great Trek, culminating in the Boer War, language contact diminished but never ceased throughout the 19th century. In the past two generations the number of bilinguals within the white community has risen to a percentage unparallelled in any other country. Moreover, in many regions domains seem to have become allo­ cated to each language in an almost complementary way. For instance, it has been claimed that the army grew to be predominantly Afrikaans-speaking, whereas trade is frequently done in English. Nobody, therefore, can communi­ cate fully using exclusively words from his or her native language. In conse­ quence, the number of loanwords in SAfE is much higher than in AmE or in AusE (but Afrikaans has taken in more words from English than English has from Afrikaans).12 2.1.2. ESD communities No quantificational study has been made to show whether the classic form of diglossia is significantly different from other types. A high degree of contact and easy transfer is to be expected from the high to the low and from the low to the high language, especially where a 'mesolect' mediates between the two extremes. Thus, it comes as no surprise to find that the lexis of ScE is much more distinctive than that of IrE (cf. ch. 6). Apart from other factors related to the social and cultural histories of the two communities, the availability of Scots (rather than Scottish or Irish Gaelic) as a source for lexical complementation appears to account for ScE being conspicuously rich in localized lexis. No comprehensive dictionary of an ESD variety involving a creole language is available, nor is there a study of how intensively internal borrowing from creole has affected the local English (often referred to as the acrolect to stress the cline of creole-ness). It is to be expected, however, that the growing accept­ ability of creoles in most societies will mean that this source of colloquial speech will be tapped increasingly for texts which are clearly intended to be English.

12 How many of the words used in utterances by the other group should be considered loanwords is an open question, and one almost impossible for a lexicographer to answer (see Branford 1978). Rapid changes in the social and political structure of the country will make statements based on conditions of the 1970s of historical value only, or have already done so, as is reflected in the successive editions of the dictionary.

2 Innovation in New Englishes

49

2.1.3. ESL societies: India It is very difficult to generalize about the lexical impact of local or national languages on the regional form of English in ESL countries, since so much depends on what is accepted as forming part of the local lexis. In India and Nigeria thousands of indigenous words occur in utterances that are predomi­ nantly English or meant to be English; on the other hand, many speakers use native words facetiously, uttering them with inverted commas, so to speak. Also some kinds of technical registers (e.g. of Indian administration) tend to be full of indigenous words, but it would be unwise to accept them as IndE.13 A look at any Indian newspaper in English, whether metropolitan or provincial, easily shows that the number of words from Indian languages contained in them is quite small — smaller in fact than, say, the number of English loanwords in German newspapers. Lexical innovation in ESL varieties does not, then, appear to proceed primarily through borrowing. This may be partly due to the different status of the languages involved: while it may well be quite acceptable to use English loanwords in native utterances, the intrusion of indigenous lexis into English may well be stigmatized.14 Note that such stigmatization does not exclude the possibility of deliberate code-mixing, where the speaker often playfully uses more than one language in an utterance, but keeps the linguistic systems apart. 2.2. Word-formation 2.2.0. The coining of words for new referential needs would seem to be a more sensitive indicator of the attitudes of speakers to linguistic norms than borrowing — which is always the easiest way of expanding the vocabulary. Now, any language system permits a huge number of coinages as long as they are in accordance with productive word-formation patterns, but there are many restrictions at work that delimit their acceptance locally (cf. ch. 3). An inves­ tigation of coinages is therefore likely to tell us a great deal about independence

13

Although Yule & Burnell's Hobson-Jobson (21905) is subtitled "A Glossary of Colloquial Anglo-Indian Words and Phrases", it contains thousands of technical terms derived from Indian languages: the two compilers collected rare and often dubious words, many of which were probably little known and whose status as English was doubtful even in the 19th century. 14 The situation can be compared with that in England during the Renaissance, when borrow­ ing from Latin, in lexis and syntax, was permitted, or even sought after, especially in formal texts, whereas interference from English was stigmatized in Latin.

50

2 Innovation in New Englishes

from, as against submission to, a metropolitan norm — submission being cer­ tain to prevail in the early stages of a colony's history. New Englishes, like those of America or Australia, are therefore the most fruitful vocabularies to investigate. 2.2.1. The United States As in other colonial ENL varieties, word-formation in early AmE was marked by unusual coinages; this feature is also found in some ESL varieties (such as West African or South Asian Englishes). On the other hand, AmE (and AusE) has always been more open to colloquial usage than BrE, usage which finds expression in picturesque compounds in particular (cf. ch. 3). Other special features of AmE lexis, so it is often alleged, is the frequency of zero-derivations, many of which were criticized by British word-watchers, and verbs with the prefix de- and the suffix -ize.15 Further types usually con­ nected with AmE rather than other varieties, at least in the number and popular­ ity of the formations, could be mentioned. These would include -ery (as in bakery), -wise (as in money-wise) or -conscious (as in health-conscious) as well as backformations of the typewrite and spectate type: all these are used in BrE and other Englishes, but occur more frequently in AmE. These phenomena suggest that the Americans have remained more open to colloquial innovation, and more inclined towards linguistic experiments in word-formation than have the British, who apparently inherited from their 18thcentury ancestors more restrictive attitudes towards neologisms. However, all the patterns used in AmE are also used in BrE; the two varieties — in so far as differences still exist — differ mainly in the frequencies and stylistic values of such coinages. 2.2.2. Australia AusE is similar in many ways to AmE, but there are also conspicuous differ­ ences, like the frequency of rhyming slang in AusE, a feature which is virtually absent from AmE, and stylistically more restricted in BrE. Also, AusE probably

l5 Mencken's footnote (1977:243) expressing his disgust at finding obituarize, "a monster so suggestive of American barbarism in the Times", illustrates how even specialists can be misled by their preconceptions — and also shows the author's very critical attitude towards his native variety.

2 Innovation in New Englishes

51

has the largest number of diminutives outside Scotland,16 and it has the wide­ spread ending -o, which is comparatively rare in other Englishes, where it is found mainly in obvious clippings such as demonstration), hippo(potamus) and (AusE) metho — either 'a Methodist', or 'a drinker of methylated spirits'. As far as compounds are concerned, coinages from English material exhibit a similar chronological pattern to that of loanwords mentioned above. On going through the AND files, I arranged the compounds and fixed combinations of AusE innovations containing bush, native and wild as their first elements, and added the items found in the dictionary collections that did not make their way into the printed version: the terminological designations for Australian fauna and flora containing native and wild were more or less complete by 1880, and whereas combinations with wild are still frequent (though not all are dictionaryworthy), creativity with native has almost ceased. By contrast, bush is still moderately productive in accepted compounds in the 20th century:

1830 1840 1850 1880 1990

Table 1:

bush 12 = 7.4% 30= 18.4 66= 40.5 104= 63.8 163 = 100

native 17 = 21.8% 21 = 26.9 50= 64.1 69 = 88.5 78 = 100

wild 13 = 34.2% 15 = 39.3 20 = 52.6 31 = 81.6 38 = 100

The relative increase of compounds with bush, native and wild in AusE, 1830-1990 (based on AND files).

Another very productive pattern was to combine colours with common names of animals and plants, alone or in the type represented by yellow-breasted robin etc. However, there are significant differences between the individual colours, between animals and plants, and the ratio of simple and expanded premodifiers (note the contrast between animals and plants!), as a look at highly selective data drawn from the AND illustrates (table 2 below). These figures change again when the data from the AND files not included in the dictionary are taken into account (rejections being particularly numerous with plants). 16

Many of these are not quite serious. The facetious character of -ie derivatives in AusE is brought out by a letter to the editor in The Australian 2 April, 1992, p. 10 which refers to the use of sparkle 'electrician' in an earlier article: From a humble sparkie to a journo. Virginia Westbury (The Australian Maga­ zine, 28-29/3) needs to know that if this sparkie refers to a chippie as a "plan­ icie" he would likely be assumed to have gone troppo from hitting the metho and be advised to take a sickie. — RODERICK CRUICE, Dayboro, Qld.

52

2 Innovation in New Englishes

Comparative figures for other varieties of English are sadly lacking. Compari­ son could bring out differences in word-formation patterns preferred in individ­ ual varieties and investigate how far these depend on encyclopedic differences — the number of new objects to be named — and on linguistic differences. animals

plants

white exp.

12 53

17

—

82

red exp.

17 28

19 1

65

black exp.

15 11

32 3

61

Table 2:

total

Compounds containing white, red and black (exp. = expanded) in AusE (based on AND files).

2.2.3. ESL communities: India IndE is one of the best integrated ESL varieties; a few remarks on its coinages will point out the contrast with the New Englishes of native-speaker societies. Nihalani et al (1979) list many newly coined words that have become more or less common and acceptable in India. New compounds predominate, obviously because the system of compounding is much more open in English than are the patterns available for new derivations.17 In fact, it is difficult to determine what is 'wrong' with formations like bed-tea for 'tea served in bed' or even pindrop silence; it is only where semantic distinctions are violated, as is the case with beer bottle meaning both 'bottle of beer' and 'beer bottle', that the usefulness of such compounds is doubtful (for further examples see ch. 3).18 However, it is difficult to decide what is conventional in English in India, and therefore part of IndE, and what is not. The following coinages are found

17 The general conclusion that ESL communities are most hesitant about coining derivations is (possibly) becoming less compelling for recent developments. Mbangwana (1992) lists exciting new words for Cameroon; these include coinages like goalard, sporter, bilingualise, husbie ('husband') and pregnanted (1992:98). The matter deserves more thorough, and com­ parative, investigation. 18 More extensive use of N+N compounds is evident in a comparison with BrE — but not so much with AmE, whose speakers would find little to object to in welcome address (for address of welcome, Nihalani et al. 1979:192), since Americans use combinations like department head without qualms.

2 Innovation in New Englishes

53

in the expository text of a recent book on Indian linguistics (Dubey 1989): writing finis (deadline), information-ridden, independent-spirited (generation), skills-minded (teachers), home-sent (driver), duck-stuffing (spoon-feeding), trouble sources and foundation stage work. Most of these sound odd to British ears, and only duck-stuffing, based on different cultural conditions, would seem to be justified. It is impossible to say how current, or how acceptable, such coinages are in India — the fact that they found their way into print should certainly not be given too much weight. 2.2.4. Pidgins and creoles Pidgins and creoles are marginal to my discussion: they are not properly part of English, and their reduced word-formation potential leads one to expect a small number of coinages.19 And yet, there are interesting types of formations which illustrate what form lexical innovation can take under different conditions: 1)

Transparency of new items appears to be a guiding principle even more than in ESL varieties: this is one of the reasons why new compounds are so much preferred (some of which, like door-mouth, mouth-water, and long-head are of course calques). Their plastic nature makes them excel­ lent candidates for acceptance into the local Englishes.

2)

Reduplication (of nouns, adjectives and verbs) provides an easy means of creating intensifying uses — or to avoid homophones (as in Tok Pisin sipsip 'sheep, mutton', vs. sip 'ship', pispis 'urine' vs. pis 'fish'). Where­ as the pattern exists in English, it is normally restricted to informal varieties (goody-goody).

3)

With all the limitations of derivational morphology, certain types tend to become productive in creoles; some are outside of St E norms, and there­ fore look quite strange: thus, in Jamaican, the productivity of -ify deriva­ tions (funkify, heatify, jokify, Cassidy & LePage 1980).

4)

Jamaican with its Rastafari innovations (Pollard 1986) in words starting with /ai/, as in I-men 'amen', I-quality 'equality', and other transforma-

19

Apart from the PC's limited word-formation potential, it is also the availability of an H language for easy borrowing that can stifle creativity. This happened to English in the Middle Ages (when the ratio of loanwords in the entire vocabulary went up from 3% to 60%), and is happening today in Tok Pisin where the modest word-formation possibilities (mainly com­ pounds and clumsy paraphrases) are not fully exploited because a short and precise English word is nearly always available.

2 Innovation in New Englishes

54

tions like downpress 'oppress', backative 'strength' and various new meanings, illustrates how deliberate coinages by one influential group can spread through wider sections of the community. 2.2.5. Coinages in EFL varieties? Since the norm in EFL countries is external, innovations in the English used by speakers are impossible in principle; however, exceptions are likely to be found in two areas: a)

b)

A particular deviation may not be recognized as such, and the innovation may thus become institutionalized in spite of prescriptive efforts by teachers to stop such illegitimate word-breeding. References to local referents will require a certain expansion of the Eng­ lish used, whether in the form of loanwords, compounds and/or new senses.

The majority of suspected cases of innovation does, however, happen in the receptor language. French tennisman and German dressman 'male model' are undisputably innovations — but they are French and German words (however much criticized). Franglais is a form of French and not a variety of English. In other cases, the coinage is made ad hoc (an adhocism as speakers might say in South Asia), possibly created for a certain effect and not intended as a permanent contribution to the non-English language. Such are the cases I have discussed in (1989b, 1994a, and cf. ch. 3): I have never seen the word smogging used again to render the concept 'jogging in the smog' (if it were, it might well be an independent new creation20), and coinages referring to individual political events are not likely to become generic anyway. (It might be inter­ esting to reflect on the status of words like smogging, dressman or twen ('person between twenty and twenty-nine') if ENL societies came to like these words and adopt them as items of, say, BrE or AmE.) 2.3. New meanings 2.3.1. A divergence between the meanings of a word in two historically related varieties can be due to one of two causes: 20

A second, less felicitous instance of smogging was found in 1992 to refer to an informal type (jogging) of smoking ('dinner jacket') and the Frankfurter Rundschau of 25 August, 1993, has a headline suggesting "wogging" as a remedy for diabetes; the coinage is an obvious failure since the intended blend of wandern ('hike') and jogging cannot be recog­ nized by the reader.

2 Innovation in New Englishes

1) 2)

55

retention of an older meaning in one of two varieties, that is loss of an older meaning in the other; innovation, that is development of a new meaning in the one or the other variety, or the independent rise of the same or a different meaning in both.

Such changes can be the consequences of language contact (as in AmE dumb, influenced by German dumm; fresh byvfrech), of the erroneous application of an old word to referents of similar appearance, or of deliberate name-giving as a reaction to referential or expressive needs. The problem is that we can establish the identity of objects or concepts, but not of meanings which are defined linguistically, that is by oppositions within lexical fields. To quote one example: if different speech communities refer to the best room in the house as a diningroom, living-room, parlor, lounge, front room etc. it is difficult to find out precisely what speakers mean and how to compare these meanings across the seven seas. Also, much will depend on whether we are willing to accept connotational features as semantic components: style shifting in emigrated words appears to be quite a common phenomenon not only in ESL varieties such as IndE but also in, say, AusE. There are many differences of meaning for which convincing reasons cannot be established with any certainty. Why, for instance, did barn in America come to include a place where animals are kept? There were no rabbits in America, so why did Americans use rabbit and hare to refer to two subspecies of hares? While admitting that changes of meaning in colonial Englishes are often dif­ ficult to interpret, we can point to a few recurring causes for the modification of the content side of lexical items: 2.3.2. Changes resulting from environmental differences G.P. Marsh (here quoted from Baker 1970:296) drew attention to American naming practices as early as 1860: The native names for all these objects were hard to pronounce, harder to remember, and the colonists, therefore, took the simple and obvious method of applying to the native products of America the names of the European plants and animals which most resembled them [...] not unfrequently, the application of the European name is founded on very slight resemblances.

If corn was used for the most common kind of grain in Britain, that is for 'wheat' in England, but for 'oats, barley' in Scotland, it is not surprising to find that it came to be applied to 'maize' in America, even if it was initially pre­ fixed by the modifier Indian. Australians, meeting with an even less European

56

2 Innovation in New Englishes

countryside, played downright havoc, so a biologist would claim, with the 'proper' meanings of BrE words, applying the terms beech, fir etc. to objects that had little resemblance to, and often no botanical relationship whatsoever with, the species so designated in Britain. Again, they discarded the native names which may have sounded strange, but would not have given rise to misunderstandings (koala is much better than native bear, as used in the 19th century). The problem was of course exacerbated by the fact that most early Australian immigrants came from urban Southern England and were, in con­ sequence, little qualified to categorize the elements of the countryside. Finally, the application of a British name to a foreign plant would provide a reference to back home; to name the eucalyptus in your garden a 'beech' would help make you at home in the new country. An illustration of how a different cultural context (and a non-British text type) can affect the meaning of established BrE words is provided by Indian matrimonial advertisements. Where the entire set-up is different, the lexis can be expected to be different too: however, it is not so much new coinages (like intercaste, sub-sect and non-propertied) that distinguish these texts but unusual meanings attached to familiar words: a man looking for a bride is alternatively called a bridegroom, a groom or a boy,21 and a woman is referred to as a girl or a spinster. (For further analysis see ch. 7.) Communication is likely to break down as far as non-Indians are concerned — for whom these texts are, of course, not intended — even without a single non-English word involved. 2.3.3. Changes connected with expressive functions It is dangerous to generalize, but one striking feature in the divergent meanings of some words in AmE and AusE seems to reflect a common tendency. While the British differentiated between a small or general shop and a large store, or a small stone and a large rock, early speakers of AmE preferred the more ambi­ tious word in each pair (Mencken 1977:137). In Australia, and in America, the word village was not commonly used, a small settlement being named a town or even a city when founded, possibly expressing the great expectations of the founding fathers.22 It may be for similar reasons that terms like doctor or v boy 'a native servant in a colonial household' is another extension of sense, but not confined to India, whereas the innovated sense of butler apparently is. (The etymology of boy is disputed; if it is a loanword from an Indian language, the identity of form is accidental, and the interpretation as an instance of polysemy a secondary development.) 22

Cf. Mencken (1977:138f.) quoting from Horwill: "In England city is restricted to a large and important town, or one that contains a cathedral; in America it has long been applied to

2 Innovation in New Englishes

51

professor, academy, college and high school proliferate in America. These specimens also illustrate possible connections with euphemisms, the use of cover terms for taboo subjects. Mencken (1977:355) draws attention to the Puritan background of their widespread use in AmE, which saw "the nasty revival of prudery associated with the name of Victoria going to extreme lengths in the United States" (1977:356), giving us the cock/rooster and legl limb syndrome, abundantly documented by Mencken (1977:357) for the period from 1820 to 1880. Innovation in this context can only mean various degrees of prissiness and slightly varying cover terms for the taboo topics, with a cultural background that remained surprisingly similar in the two nations. 2.3.4. New terminologies New institutions need new names; sometimes old words are used for the pur­ pose, with the new meaning defined by the authorities. There are very early instances of this in medieval English, when the Normans introduced many loanwords, but in some instances re-defined existing words, as was the case with knight, which came to be used as an equivalent of chevalier/equester. The political vocabulary of UsE, CanE and AusE is markedly different from that of BrE. This fact is unremarkable where new words are used, since they do not exist in BrE, and are therefore impossible to misunderstand. However, many words were re-used, with a new sense, and others were revived to serve as terms in, say, law and administration, as reeve was in CanE. Since innovation23 is a necessary measure to provide terms for the different institutions in a new society, the fact was commented on by as early a writer as N. Webster in a classical passage in his American Dictionary which is worth quoting in full: [...] the institutions in this country which are new and peculiar, give rise to new terms or to new applications of old terms, unknown to the people of England; which cannot be explained by them and which will not be inserted in their dictionaries, unless copied from ours. Thus the terms land-office; landwarrant, location of land [...], plantation, selectmen, senate, congress, court, assembly escheat, etc. are either words not belonging to the language in Eng-

much smaller places". In Alaska, town came to mean 'white settlement', village 'native settlement' (Tabbert 1991:49). 23

The term 'innovation' is used by Webster himself in a very negative meaning referring to a different context, when he mentions "that dabbling spirit of innovation which is perpetually disturbing its settled usages and filling it with anomalies [...]" (1828, Preface).

2 Innovation in New Englishes

58

land, or they are applied to things in this country which do not exist in that. (1828, Preface)

Politically motivated changes of words in SAfE should also be classified under this heading: ban 'to prohibit an individual from attending or addressing gatherings [...]'; Coloureds 'a racial group in terms of the Population Registration Act'; homeland 'area set aside for a particular African people' (definitions from Branford 1978).

These words received new, euphemistic, senses intended to cloak the brutal realities of the apartheid system of the National Party Government — such meanings are now obsolescent and marked 'historical' in more recent diction­ aries.24 Synonyms can be distinguished to serve two different functions, as happened to BrE premier and prime minister. Whereas prime minister retains its international meaning in AusE, premier is restricted to the head of each of the Australian states. 2.3.5. Slang Since slang is normally informal, short-lived and regionally restricted, it is easy to predict that innovation will outdistance retention of the vocabulary shared between Britain and its (former) colonies. In fact, it comes as a surprise to find that there is any substantial overlap between these vocabularies. This is most striking in AusE, at least in the period preceding World War I, which had most of its early slang imported from London. In 1900 the Sydney newspaper Truth noted that "Cockney slang is quickly displacing the old push lingo in Sydney" (quoted from Baker 1970:358). Modern technology has of course transported AmE slang around the world through films, pop songs — and the army. As in other areas, innovation is now likely to happen in one variety, and then be exported. 3. Conclusion 3.1. Innovation in an international context For many centuries, innovation in all kinds of English was primarily a matter of borrowing from other languages, in particular from French and Latin (a fact 24

The 1991 edition of the dictionary takes account of recent political changes by adding "formerly" to the definition of ban; coloured is "now avoided by many publications and speakers", and shudder quotes are used when homelands are referred to as 'independent'; further adaptations will be necessary in a fifth edition.

2 Innovation in New Englishes

59

which has brought the proportion of such loanwords in English up to 60%, regardless of the size of the vocabulary analysed). However, an analysis of newword dictionaries of BrE, AmE and AusE shows that the proportion of loanwords among neologisms is now minimal25 (and most of these loanwords have only a dubious claim to being English). By contrast, other languages now accept a large number of their new words from English.26 Then, too, the source of new English words has shifted from Britain to the United States. No figures are available, but it seems safe to say that Britain was the great inno­ vator right into the 19th century, whereas the leadership of America in inter­ national communication and commerce as well as its political and military power brought about a notable shift in the 20th century; this means that inno­ vations in BrE are now very likely to be due to interdialectal borrowing from AmE rather than home-grown. The other English-speaking countries share Britain's fate, except that their impact on world English is even less, and their receptive function vis-à-vis BrE and AmE even more conspicuous. 3.2. Innovation as a general and as a linguistic feature It would be tempting to assume that societies innovative in linguistic matters are so in other respects as well, and that conservatism is also a general charac­ teristic that runs through the most various manifestations of life, including dress, food, technology, education, literature and language. Scholars should, however, resist the temptation to resort to all too easy explanations: it remains uncertain how far particular forms of innovation not only reflect specific needs of communication in societies with different structures, and in countrysides quite unlike those 'back home', but also express different world views, national characters and ways of thinking (à la Sapir-Whorf). Wierzbicka (1986) claims they do, but then bases her assumption on small parts of AusE which are highly connotative and expressive, viz. intimate forms of first names and diminutives or depreciatives or, more recently, verbs like dob, shyack or shout. Since 'national character' (or the stereotypical views of nations) have been connected 25

Bauer's count of new words recorded in the OED Supplements showed 75% native coinages as against 25% loanwords, among which Latin (4.3%), French (4%), Greek (3%) and German (2.5%) were most frequent (1994a:35); numbers of course largely depend on the OED's system of etymological classification and possible bias in its selection of entries. 26

This fact has triggered a number of puristic measures, including legislation, in countries as far apart as Iceland and France, India and the Philippines. For word-trade with France cf. Görlach (1995b), for a comparative study of anglicisms in European languages cf. Görlach (1994g).

60

2 Innovation in New Englishes

with language structures in an impressionistic and uncautious way too often in the history of linguistics, it seems wise not to jump to conclusions prematurely. Furthermore, whether conservatism can be measured in various fields, and how these data could be correlated is impossible to determine in any rigorous way. A single instance does not prove anything, but may serve as a warning: the Krio society of Freetown in Sierra Leone used to be very conservative in fashion, its general way of life, religion and politics — but its language is a highly innovative West African (English-based) creole; conservatism in some fields contrasts here with innovation in linguistic matters. Admittedly, American and Australian communities as frontier societies were innovative, open to ex­ periment and thus liable to drift away from the conservative mother country, in action as in language. However, Canada and New Zealand cultivated conser­ vative traits and harmonization with Britain in order to distance themselves from their powerful neighbours, which brought about varieties somehow inter­ mediate between BrE and UsE, and BrE and AusE. To equate conservatism and innovation in life and language and to stress one of the two tendencies and neglect the other harbours the dangers of involving us in a vicious circle — and of suppressing contrary evidence. Innovation may be too vague a term, and societies and languages not homogeneous enough to allow a sensible statement about the degree of conservatism and innovation affecting different types of societies and their language histories — or their developments in other areas of life.

WORD-FORMATION AND THE ENL: ESL: EFL DISTINCTION1

1. The problem 1.1. History of research The classification of speech communities as ENL, ESL, EFL (and ESD, EBL) according to what use they make of English has been widely accepted. The distinction is certainly uncontroversial where the range of functions in a specific speech community is concerned, even if there are, of course, border-line cases in a synchronic analysis (say Israel, Egypt, Iraq, or Pakistan) and also individual developments from one category to another — a well-known dynamism which has been discussed quite frequently (cf. Moag 1982b and, most recently, Görlach 1988a and ch. 1). However, language-in-society categories do not always have unambiguous equivalents in sociolinguistic ones (for a short, but eminently readable differentiation between the two approaches cf. Trudgill 1978). It is quite a different matter to determine whether we can correlate the ENL: ESL: EFL classification with an unambiguous set of distinctive features — which would make it possible, ideally, to identify texts as coming from ENL as against ESL or EFL sources, disregarding questions of the individual speaker's/writer's fluency, competence or (in)security, but relating the text to a norm2 instead. Such linguistic features are to be expected, if they do indeed exist, on all levels of linguistic analysis: 1. 2. 3. 4.

phonetics, phonology and intonation; morphology and syntax; lexis and semantics; pragmatics.

1

The paper is here reprinted from English World-Wide 10 (1989), 279-313.

2

Note that 'norm' does not presuppose that there is a 'standard/standardization' of the lan­ guage/variety in question; whether texts conform to a particular norm has to do with accept­ ability judgements rather than grammaticality. I use the term here largely as defined by Coseriu (1952).

62

3

Word-formation and the ENL: ESL: EFL distinction

However, since these fields have been investigated with varying degrees of thoroughness, and since these levels relate to the norm problem and its relevance for the ENL: ESL: EFL distinction in different ways, it seems appropriate to make a pilot study of the level that promises to be most fruitful — wordformation. The obstacles that stand in the way of successful investigation on other levels can be illustrated from the field of pronunciation: there are studies of many ENL varieties, but examination of how much variation there is in individual ESL communities has only been begun for a few regions (such as Singapore). For all other communities (such as Nigeria or India) there are, at best, investigations of 'dialects' but no sound definition of intelligibility and its application to intraand international communication. (For a very useful survey see Nelson 1982.) Moreover, with the possible exception of Nihalani et al. (1979), there has been no coherent attempt at defining (or even prescribing) a local norm for the pro­ nunciation of English which would make degrees of acceptance and individual deviances possible indicators in the sense of this enquiry. By contrast, the lexicons of individual varieties have been documented com­ paratively exhaustively: the use of individual words appears to attract greater attention among the norm-conscious than other areas of language do. Within lexis, the field of word-formation seems likely to be especially fruitful ground for an investigation since lexical innovation in the various types of speech community can be a) b) c)

documented in texts (and analysed as to word-formation patterns, frequency and its relation to text type); investigated in acceptability tests applied to speakers of the variety in question, or to speakers of other varieties, in particular ENL ones; examined for what it can reveal of the potential of the linguistic system and the limits of the norm underlying a particular innovation.

1.2. Word-formation as a fruitful topic in variation It is a truism that an existing language has to be adapted if it is to serve a different speech community in a different world — whether geographically, culturally or diachronically. New words and new meanings of old words are, then, what is to be expected from the history both of a language in a single, constant community, such as English spoken by Englishmen in England, and also of transplanted varieties, whether these are ENL, ESL, ESD or EFL ones, and it need not even be the case that such expansions are most conspicuous in

3

Word-formation and the ENL: ESL: EFL distinction

63

the very early phases (when, for instance, bonds with the mother country can be too strong to allow more wide-ranging deviances from metropolitan norms). There are three major ways of expanding the vocabulary: borrowing from other languages, coining new words and expressions, and extending the meaning of existing words. Of these, borrowing has been comparatively well-documented; probably because loanwords are conspicuous, they appear to be in greater need of glossing and are more likely to be collected in dictionaries. The description of changes of meaning has fared much worse, in the case of both individual varieties and comparative treatments. In particular, whereas loanwords can be expected to be current in well-defined areas (initially co-extensive with the community using or knowing the source language), changes of meaning can spread or originate independently, and they will be overlooked by wordwatchers more easily than loanwords. Finally, it is very difficult to decide what should be classified as change of meaning. For instance, does the transfer to a new referent considered to have similar characteristics, such as the extension of a European tree name to an Indian or Australian species, qualify? Does the changed connotation of a word count, and how much change of connotation must there be? For various reasons, it seems both safer and conducive to greater theoretical insight to investigate the new words that have been formed on the basis of the various existing word-formation patterns: as has long been recognized, there is a next-to-infinite number of potential words in the system of a language with productive word-formation such as English, but which new words are actually formed and accepted depends on the specific norms of the individual commu­ nity. Such acceptance is apparently determined by: 1. 2.

the need for a new word to refer to an entity which has no word, or only an inadequate one; conventions of expression (especially in such domains as literature or advertising) which give greater weight to such matters as expressive form, playfulness and non-conformity.

There are contributory factors which are difficult to establish, or at least whose relative importance is difficult to assess, such as a) euphony, b) con­ trastive or other relations between the new form and an existing one, and c) calquing on word-formations in another language (such as Latin in 16th-century Britain or Hindi in India). Such criteria do not explain the existence of a third type of neologism (but they can help to explain the comparative failure of such words to be accepted), viz.:

64

3.

3

Word-formation and the ENL: ESL: EFL distinction

Words coined from a momentary inability to express oneself adequately (using an accepted term), or a more general lack of competence which finds expression in syntactical clumsiness — or the tentative, groping, ad-hoc formation of unnecessary and ill-formed words.

1.3. The scope of this study In what follows, I will investigate seven types of English-using community, analysing what evidence they provide of word-formation, and what the reasons for the specific nature of such neologisms are: a) b) c) d) e) f) g)

a native-speaker community with emergent norms: Early Modern English in England (16th century); a community with a native-speaker dialect in an ESD situation: Scotland; native-speaker 'colonial' societies with 'transplanted' Englishes (U.S.A., Australia/New Zealand) and those in bilingual/multilingual communities (in parts of Canada, South Africa); communities in which English co-exists with an English-related pidgin or creole: Jamaica and Sierra Leone; second-language communities (Nigeria, India, Singapore); a foreign-language community (Germany).

In all this, the evidence must be expected to vary with the style of discourse: the distinction between written and spoken, formal vs. informal, and the con­ ventions of various individual registers/text types/domains will have to be taken into account. For instance, spoken English contains more instances of ill-formed ad-hoc expressions owing to the speaker's inability to edit his speech; or advertising may well deliberately flout (or play with) established conventions for the sake of the expected appeal to the potential buyer. It is therefore important to compare instances of specific styles with each other — if it can be assumed that the same text functions exist in each case. Obviously, the number and types of coinages will differ from one speech community to another according to its communicative needs and the functions for which it uses English. The extent to which its innovations are documented, expecially in dictionaries, will also vary.

3

needs:

Word-formation and the ENL: ESL: EFL distinction

referential needs stylistic improvement lack of competence colloquial/expressive

χ x χ (χ)

(-)

χ ? χ

χ

χ

χ (-)

χ (-)

-

χ -

χ

65

-

χ -

dictionaries

bias towards literary texts bias towards archaisms

χ -

χ χ

(χ)

-

-

χ -

0 0

preferred types of word-formation

compounding derivation conversion

+ +

+ + +

+ (+)

+ + +

+ + (+)

+ (+) (+)

+ (+)

(The prominence of a factor is marked '+', its absence by '-'; 0 = 'does not apply'). Table 1: Motivations for coinages in different types of English-using communities

2. State of research and data used in this investigation 2.0. There is no systematic or exhaustive treatment of English word-formation that takes account of regional variation. We are comparatively well-informed only about the diachronic dimension (Marchand 1969); there are also some studies of individual aspects of AmE, AusE (Dabke 1976), and IndE (Kachru 1983), but the few pages in Platt et al (1984:95-99) appear to be the only attempt so far to demarcate the area requiring comparative research. Apart from material found in the treatments mentioned above, two types of evidence were available for this paper; their limitations will be discussed to prevent undue expectations being raised: 2.1. Primary sources: newspapers These texts have a great number of advantages that make them more rewarding for analysis than other types of text: 1) 2) 3) 4)

newspapers are comparatively easy to obtain from various countries; they can be expected to provide similar text types; the texts are usually close to a written local norm; the texts can be compared world-wide with respect to the events they deal with and the way these are covered.

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Word-formation and the ENL: ESL: EFL distinction

However, initial expectations from this type of source were not fulfilled. It turns out that there is much less evidence per page than could be considered statis­ tically relevant, and that what data there are manifest themselves in two areas not central to the concerns of the linguist interested in systematic characteristics of the variety in question: a)

b)

The number of irregular formations increases the further one gets away from metropolitan papers. Such deviances often go together with uncom­ mon, or faulty syntax, and can probably not be taken as forming part of a local norm, perhaps not even as indicators of a wider range of accept­ ability than in the national papers. In headlines, short words are preferred for obvious reasons. Where no short synonym is available, clippings often serve. They do not quite agree in all varieties of English, but their very specialized use and acceptance only in the given typographical context make them marginal for our investigation (cf. 4.5. below).

2.2. Secondary sources: dictionaries Since no handbooks of word-formation exist for the varieties under investiga­ tion, dictionaries are the only comprehensive secondary source available. However, for present purposes, they have certain general and specific limita­ tions. In general, dictionaries tend not to include transparent formations. This means that a statistical analysis of compounding in an individual variety based on dictionary evidence would arrive at grossly misleading results. Certain types of highly productive derivational patterns (such as abstract nouns in -ness, or agent nouns in -er, or adjectives in -able) are likely to suffer from similar distortions. Moreover, such transparent coinages appear less striking to the lexicographer, and are therefore less likely to be included in the dictionary. This is particularly true of exclusive dictionaries (such as collections of SouthAfricanisms or Indianisms). Specifically, the aims, scope and quality of existing dictionaries vary so greatly that a comparison based on such data would be extremely risky; indeed, for some varieties there is no dictionary whatsoever. There is another danger of which lexicographers in the field seem to be insufficiently aware; at least, they have not done enough so far to avoid one of its pitfalls, namely that the word listed is not exclusive to the variety described. J. Branford listed invariable isn't it? as SAfE in the (1978, 1980) editions of her dictionary although the expression is in fact much more widespread. Many words and expressions listed in Nihalani et al. appear to be current in West Africa, too, e.g. pindrop silence (R. Agheyisi, p.c.). That the new dictionary of

3

Word-formation and the ENL: ESL: EFL distinction

67

AusE (Ramson 1988) with its 6,000 entries contains fewer words than many may have expected is at least partly owing to the fact that many candidates proved not be exclusive to AusE, or were not coined there, and were therefore excluded. 3. Word-formation in various types of Englishes 3.1. Early Modern English, especially 1550-1630 Word-formation in the heyday of the EModE period (cf. Görlach 1991b: 170-81) is here contrasted with PrE as a type of English in which — as has often been stated — widespread efforts to create a norm on the basis of educated London speech affected spelling, inflection and syntax, but apparently had less immediate effect on the lexicon. On the contrary, the wealth of new words coined — and borrowed — in this period has often been seen as an exuberance whose excesses had to be pruned down at a later stage, in particular by the grammarians, lexicographers and stylistic gurus of the 18th century. Part of this impression is certainly skewed by the data that survive, and in particular by their coverage in the OED. Unfortunately, there is no nativespeaker competence available that would permit us to test our hypotheses, in particular about EModE linguistic norms and attitudes. However, the reasons why new words were coined during that period are obvious, even if the categories often cannot be clearly distinguished when applied to individual cases: 1)

There was an obvious need for new designations for objects and concepts in specialized domains, especially those newly acquired from French (e.g. law) and Latin (the sciences). Note that most of these gaps were filled by loanwords and the extension of the meanings of existing words and not by new coinages.

2)

A great need was felt to polish up the 'barbarous tongue'. Principles of classical decorum and verbal copiousness led to a wealth of coinages which added synonyms or homoionyms (words of similar meaning) to existing words; obviously the blocking of new formations by another word already available was largely neglected as a consequence of these specific considerations. The number of such 'unnecessaryv' words was swelled by the metrical demands of poetic forms: new formations, adding or subtracting syllables from existing words, were not only permitted in accordance with poetic licence, but were described as instances of rhetorical figures and thus became graces, rather than vices, of speech. As

68

3

Word-formation and the ENL: ESL: EFL distinction

suggested above, the evidence in the OED greatly distorts the picture since it gives too great coverage to poetic texts, and thereby gives excessive prominence to the phenomenon, often including rare forms coined exclusively for the sake of metre. 3)

The absence of grammars and dictionaries of English until around 1600, and the rarity of such books in the 17th century would have made it impossible to check whether a word already existed and could therefore be considered as part of an emergent lexical norm. With the value placed on creativity and the absence of linguistic qualms in the case of duplica­ tions (2), there was an additional temptation to coin unnecessary words in consequence. Some of these are nonce-words, which suggests that they were not really part of EModE; others occur in bilingual dictionaries (Florio 1598, cf. Görlach 1991b: 178-9), where they are clearly emergency formations coined to supply translation equivalents; yet others are found in hard-word lists for which they were manufactured to increase the number of high-falutin' expressions listed (e.g. in Cockeram 1623).

Apart from the features mentioned above, all indicative of the absence of strict norms such as would be expected for ModE (at least outside playful formations in poetry, advertising, jokes or witty conversation), there was a greater freedom in the following respects: a)

b) c)

There was no concern about allowing derivations that were etymologically mixed. The type unperfect was unobjectionable well into the 17th century until purists insisted on Latin affixes on Latinate stems. There was less concern about speakability and euphony. (This statement possibly applies to written texts only). There was a new freedom to use the potentials of syntactic transforma­ tions in word-formation, that is to see nominalizations as available alternatives to clauses. This is most evident in newly recorded agent nouns in -er, action nouns in -ing and zero derivations or conversions; the latter do not increase in absolute numbers, but they do in their complexity and boldness of application. (Again, we are partly influenced here by the predominance of literary texts in the data analysed).

As the language of a unique historical period, EModE is without parallel, and cannot therefore be compared with present-day varieties of English, whether ENL, ESL, or EFL. In particular, it is unique in not having a stable norm in or beyond itself (unless Latin is seen in this function), and secondly in that value

3

Word-formation and the ENL: ESL: EFL distinction

69

judgements on EModE correctness and elegance were largely dominated by reference to Latin. On the other hand, EModE has been compared with, for instance, AmE with respect to certain features of the sociolinguistic situation. Thus, it has been claimed that AmE continues a great deal of the freedom to coin new words which was available to EModE users, but later lost in Britain mainly through the prescriptive efforts of 18th-century grammarians and lexicographers. However, Mencken refers implicitly to a much narrower norm in present-day AmE when he reflects on the liberties of Elizabethan English, here with regard to zeroderivations: The age of Shakespeare was a time of bold and often barbaric experiment in language, and some of its novelties were so extravagant that even the Ameri­ can of today finds them somewhat ultra. Shakespeare did not hesitate to use to happy, to climate, to disaster, to furnace, to malice, to property, and to verse. Some of his innovations, e.g. to fever and to foul, made their way into respectability, but others died quickly. (1977:236)

It would also be tempting to investigate how many of the EModE features which arose through lack of a norm, are also found in other less-standardized Englishes. One case might be the tendency towards transparency which appears to be a general feature of learners' and less educated language and is therefore widely attested in ESL and PC varieties (type EModE yongth for youth). 3.2. Scots The example of Scots provides an interesting illustration of what resources the English language once had, but (a) ceased to make use of, (b) used in slightly different ways, (c) did not accept as readily into written use (such as onomatopoetic words with a colloquial flavour) and (d) did not have, because the Gaelic input was not there. Scots provides a neat contrast not so much with ESL and EFL varieties as far as word-formation is concerned, but with forms of settler English transported overseas: it has a much higher proportion of retentions, and a lower ratio of innovative formations, as an obvious reflex of the lack of need to refer to new objects and concepts. (In this latter respect, of course, it differs from overseas Englishes). My analysis of the word-formation characteristics of Scots is mainly based on the excellent Concise Scots Dictionary (Robinson 1985) and its condensed version, the Pocket Scots Dictionary (Macleod et al. 1988); the latter especially reduces the huge amount of Scots lexis to manageable size, and does so by con­ centrating on those items that can be expected to have survived into the 20th

70

3

Word-formation and the ENL: ESL: EFL distinction

century, with whatever restrictions. Word-formation in Scots is typically represented by: a)

b)

retentions of OE/ME words which have been lost in ModE. However, as a consequence of incomplete historical documentation and the selectivity of modern dictionaries (non-admission of transparent compounds), iden­ tification of a word as a retention cannot be made with certainty nor can retentions be accurately quantified; innovations. These are classified as Scots because they bl) contain elements that are non-EngE (whether Germanic or Celtic) or b2) were coined in accordance with word-formation patterns common to both Scots and EngE, but happen not to have been formed (or accepted) in EngE; b3) were coined in accordance with word-formation patterns no longer productive in EngE or which have become more productive in ScE/Scots than in EngE.

It is the (b3) category that is of the greatest interest, for various reasons: to the extent that it is documented, it illustrates a) b)

c)

the unbroken vitality of the linguistic heritage of Scots; the difference between the linguistic norms of the two speech com­ munities — a difference which, though weakened over the past few centuries, has allowed Scots to retain a good deal of its local identity. This is particularly obvious in domains which have remained formally distinct (such as the law: cf. words like intromissatrix; vitious intro­ mission; stellionate n.; stupration)', the conservative character of literary Scots which is so typical of many of the norms — for obvious historical reasons.

The following types are especially frequent and typical: Derivations, nouns: Diminutive endings are quite rare in EngE, especially in formal speech; although they are an indicator of informality in Scots/ScE, too, they are more widespread, and much more acceptable (cf. AusE below, 3.3.2.): beastie, hennie 'hen, girl', wifie (also note unanalysable words such as pinkie 'little finger' and pockmantie < portmanteau, and cf. -ock in puddock 'frog' or alternating -ie/-ock: hummie/+hummock 'a pinch (of salt...)'). Derivation, verbs: in-, out-, over- combinations, in EngE only fossilized or surviving as nouns, are somewhat more conspicuous in ScE (parallel formations

3

Word-formation and the ENL: ESL: EFL distinction

71

in OE and modern German suggest that some of the words are better classified as retentions): ingaither, intak, outgae; owergang. The be-prefix, very productive in EModE but since then less common in new formations (even in literary diction), is possibly slightly more productive in Scots: begeck 'deceive', be glamour 'bewitch' (The EngE glosses have some be­ formations, all of which are 16th-century or older). Cf. a somewhat larger number of verbs formed with the prefix mis- (= 'un-, dis-'). Echoic or other fanciful formations (often ultimately deriving from badly understood Gaelic words) have a less colloquial flavour to them than in EngE: argie-bargie 'discussion', clamjamfry 'crowd of people', collieshangie 'noisy dispute', crockanition 'chaos, shambles', Hogmanay, '31st of December', hubbleshew 'uproar', huggery-muggery 'furtive', pernicketie 'very precise, fussy', ragabrash 'good-for-nothing', ramgunshoch 'bad-tempered', ramstouger(ous) 'disorderly', scurryvaig 'vagabond', stramashlstrabush 'uproar'. Note, however, that few of the words quoted are recent coinages, which serves to illustrate that Scots lacks vitality, and has in fact done so for quite some time. 3.3. 'Colonial' societies with 'transplanted' Englishes 3.3.1. U.S.A. As in a colonial ENL variety, word-formation in early AmE was tugging in two different directions. On the one hand, there was much parading of learning in the form of long Latinate words; many of these words were used in inap­ propriate contexts, in continuation of the tradition of 16th-century inkhorn terms, and the same type is also found in various ESL varieties (such as West African or South Asian Englishes). On the other hand, AmE has always been more open to colloquial uses. One of the effects of this is "the old American faculty for making picturesque compounds" as Mencken puts it (1977:205). Baker (1970), who finds much less of this in AusE, refers to expressions such as cow-catcher, to point out differences between AmE and his national variety. (Mencken's list (1977:205, n.3) includes many words whose picturesqueness has worn off through continual use, but can be recreated by analysis: highbrow (1905), hot dog (cl900), brain trust (1932), or to moonlight and to pussyfoot. For bulldozer he gives the successive meanings 'men who flogged Negroes seeking to vote' (1876), 'a revolver' (1881), 'persons applying duress to another', and 'machine for pushing earth' (OEDS, 1930)). Strevens, in his popular account of BrE vs. AmE differences, has a similar story to tell: "Americans often express pride in the vividness and vitality of their speech and writing, and contrast it with what they regard as the staid and

72

3

Word-formation and the ENL: ESL: EFL distinction

conservative usages of BrE" (1972:60). He warns us that "opinions such as these are [...] prejudices, in which a reaction to different usage is tinged with nationalism, with personal beliefs, and irrational reactions". However, such stereotypes are important to help explain why colloquial mouth-filling words such as ballyhoo, boondoggling, gobbledygook, hornswoggle and snollygoster are used, whatever ironic self-criticism may be attached to them. Also typical of AmE, so it is often alleged, is its "liking for short cuts in speech" (Mencken 1977:236), which is claimed to underlie zero-derivations in particular. Mencken quotes to service for to give service, popular since "Ameri­ can garages began servicing cars c. 1910", but also gives instances where nouns and the corresponding verbs are not identical in form in BrE, such as loan vs. lend, and signature vs. sign. It is difficult to pinpoint the reason why the British used to object so decidedly to such derivations — because they duplicated existing terms — or, rather, because they jarred on their etymological conscious­ ness, especially where words were clearly marked as nouns for those who had Latin, ending in -ure, -enee, - ity, -ion, -ee, etc., as in to signature, to evidence, to auction or audition, and to referee? Some of Mencken's illustrations still sound quite unusual (to decision 'defeat in a prize fight by decision rather than by a knockout', 1977:238) or to submarine, to solo, to night-club, whereas to auction, to audition, to referee, to pussyfoot and to mastermind have become common. I take it that such zero-derivations sound particularly 'Elizabethan' in their extravagance, but one could also point to formations with the prefix de-, such as ("in recent years" according to Mencken 1977:240f.): dewax, dejelly, degerm, dewater, debulk, detooth, depledge, deflea, derat, debamboozle — note that the recent second edition of the Random House Dictionary (1987) contains only degerm and dewater of the words quoted above, not even including the others among the undefined listings at the foot of the page (but giving full entries to, for instance, de-bus, de-gum, de-pest, and de-massify, and listings to de-foam, de-ghost, de-smog). To these the two Barnhart dictionaries add a host of other innovations such as (1973): deboost, dehire, de-orbit, derepress or deschool, or (1980): delawyer 'to eliminate the need for a lawyer's services' and deprogram, and degear and de-man as BrE innovations (all retained in the 1990 edition, with further additions). Another pattern inherited from Shakespeare's days but felt to be more productive in AmE than in Britain, are verbs formed in -ize, increasingly also suffixed to a Germanic base. Mencken quotes long lists (1977:242-3) among which glamo(u)rize, pressurize, winterize, tenderize, routinize, finalize and customize have become accepted, but sloganize, permanentize and backwardize

3

Word-formation and the ENL: ESL: EFL distinction

73

have not. Further patterns usually encountered in AmE rather than other varieties, at least in the number and popularity of the formations, might be mentioned. These include -ery (as in bakery), -wise (as in money-wise) or -con­ scious (as in health-conscious) as well as backformations of the typewrite and spedate type: all used in BrE and other Englishes, but more frequent in AmE. What all this amounts to is that the Americans have remained more open to colloquial innovation, and more inclined towards linguistic experiments in wordformation, than have the British, who have apparently inherited more restrictive attitudes towards neologisms from the 18th century. However, all the patterns used in AmE are also used in BrE; the two varieties — in so far as differences still exist — differ mainly in the frequencies and stylistic values of such coinages. 3.3.2. Australia We are particularly well informed about the lexis of AusE, or have been since the publication of the Macquarie Dictionary (Delbridge 1981) and the Australian National Dictionary (Ramson 1988). Moreover, there is much on word-forma­ tion in Baker (1970) and Dabke's monograph (1974). The most conspicuous characteristics of AusE word-formation can be summarized as follows: AusE's greater openness to colloquial use than BrE's reminds one of AmE, but it has different consequences: a)

Rhyming-slang is practically absent from AmE, and stylistically more restricted in BrE. Its presence in AusE adds to the set of compounds a substantial section of otherwise completely unmotivated expressions, such as applesauce 'horse', barmaid's blush 'flush' (in poker) or blood blister 'sister' (from Baker 1970:360).

b)

AusE has an exceptional number of diminutives, even more than in SAfE where -ie is supported by the Afrikaans equivalent in -djie/tjie. Another characteristic of AusE is the widespread ending -o, which in other varieties of English (and other languages) is mainly found in clippings. Baker, who lists many -iel-o words (1970:366-73), claims that in AusE the latter have "an entirely male flavour". Since the meaning of both formatives is largely identical, the same patterns are used for new formations, and there are a few duplicates such as commolcommy 'com­ pensation'. /-i/ words include clippings {cocky from cockatoo 'small farmer', bullocky 'bullock driver', postie 'postman'); derivations from existing words {matey) and names (joey 'small kangaroo') as well as loanwords integrated into the pattern {wallaby 'marsupial'; but billy

74

3

Word-formation and the ENL: ESL: EFL distinction

'kettle' is now explained as a survival of a Scots word (Ramson 1988)). The same patterns with -o yield arvo 'afternoon', garbo 'garbage collector', botilo 'collector of bottles'; and dingo respectively. Although there are differences in the norms of AusE and AmE, I think the two varieties are most closely equivalent in the underlying attitudes: both have developed from the speech of 'colonials' whose English was considered by educated Londoners to be a disgrace to refined taste into the language of speakers of independent varieties who refuse to be governed by British standards of decorum. Such confidence sets the two communities apart not only from selfconscious usages in ESL countries such as India, but apparently also, to a certain extent, from the English of Canada and South Africa. 3.3.3. Canada and South Africa Since both countries have two official languages and a host of others as well, they permit an interesting comparison with ESL countries — for non-native speakers, English of course functions as a second language in, for instance, Québec or Afrikaans-dominated regions. However, considerable differences exist between the two communities regarding the percentage of speakers actually competent in the other language: numbers are quite small in Canada outside the limited bilingual regions, but very high in South Africa among the white and coloured sections of the population. This fact places Canada more or less in the position of the US or Britain, where English is mainly affected by loanwords, but not so much by more intricate influences of language contact. In South Africa, by contrast, code-mixing and code-switching and various forms of interference appear to be widespread, which makes the situation there com­ parable to that in other African or Asian countries — and not just for the Black population. Word-formation in specifically SAfE items is probably most conspicuous in the following patterns: a)

b)

In compounding, loan-translations from Afrikaans are very numerous — as is to be expected, since Afrikaans not only has lexical items from the same Germanic word-stock, but also inherited very similar word-formation rules, especially in compounding. Moreover, there are apparently few restrictions on hybrid formations, for identical reasons (cf. klipfisk, klipspringer, sometimes involving folk etymology as in koeksister 'doughnut'). In derivations, there is a conspicuous number of SAfE coinages with Afrikaans equivalents, which suggests that the two languages to a certain

3

Word-formation and the ENL: ESL: EFL distinction

75

extent support each other (for -ie diminutives, cf. Branford 1980:112). Note that even greater similarities with ESL varieties are found in SAf IndE, which has a substantial number of hybrid compounds such as chana flour (cf. Mesthrie 1990). It would be particularly rewarding to explore the question of whether the linguistic situations in South Africa and India have a similar effect on the speakers' concept of 'norm' in word-formation, whether a certain insecurity leads them to expand the lexicon by overgeneralization or to avoid formations that they are not completely certain are part of the norm and therefore to be found in dictionaries. 3.4. Pidgins and creoles 3.4.0. Pidgin and creole languages have always been described as having among their most characteristic features a lack of inflectional and derivational morphology (compounding, as being more 'syntactic', does occur, but only in a limited number of patterns). This 'deficiency' makes it difficult for PC lan­ guages to expand their vocabularies to meet the demands of a full language — unless recourse is taken to wholesale borrowing of the terminologies of, say, technology and science, the law and administration. Agheyisi states this point with regard to NigPE (1988:233), but the fact is relevant for all languages of the type: The major cause of the lexical poverty of NPE is its historically reduced function; the reason for its continuing impoverishment even in the context of expanding function is attributable to the near-absence of productive wordformation devices in its grammar, a major source of lexical enrichment in most languages. Apart from reduplication (by which adverbs are formed from verbs) and a limited use of compounding (for nominalization), NPE makes no use of other systematic derivational or inflectional techniques, such as affixation. Thus, most of its lexical items are morphemically simple.

More extensive studies of the problem have been made by Allsopp (1980) and Hancock (1980), who point out that PCs have a few word-formation patterns peculiar to them, which, though no equivalent for all the patterns available to speakers of English, do make up for some of the structural 'deficiencies' of PC languages. Such reflexions, and their exemplification in 3.4.1. and 3.4.2. below, are here inserted not for their own sake but to explore how far PCs co-existing with their lexifier language are likely to affect local Englishes by giving rise to new

3

76

Word-formation and the ENL: ESL: EFL distinction

patterns of word-formation, in particular in a post-creole community in which most speakers can be expected to be bidialectal. 3.4.1. Jamaica As a creole language, Jamaican has, then, certain PC characteristics, at least in its 'pure' form unaffected by decreolization which makes itself felt in heavy borrowing from English (all examples are from Cassidy & LePage 21980): 1)

Absence of case and plural markers. Typically, compounds of the cat's-eye type with genitival marking are therefore missing: backra-hall, duppy riding-horse 'praying mantis'.

2)

Very restricted derivational morphology. This is still evident in a greater number of multifunctional words such as ugly n. (in English these would be classified as zero-derivations), but otherwise the expansion of the vocabulary has provided Jamaican with a limited number of quite pro­ ductive patterns (-v adj., -ness nouns, etc.).

3)

Reduplicated words (with African or English bases) are quite common, as nouns, adjectives (mainly intensifying), or verbs (intensifying or iterative): nyam-nyam 'eat', bogro-bogro 'coarse,' bram-bram 'kindling wood,' picky-picky 'greedy,' chaka-chaka 'disorder,' batter-batter 'beat up,' big-big 'very big'.

4)

Onomatopoetic words (in many cases containing unanalysed African etyma) are frequent: banggarang 'great noise', bragadap 'sudden motion'.

5)

There are specific creole formations, especially in lexicalized phrases with typical creole syntax, such as serialization: carry-go-bring-come n. 'tale­ bearing/tale-bearer'; or clauses: dip-and-come-back 'sauce', beg-youlittle-water 'game', pity-me-little 'ant'.

6)

A few frequent compounds are obviously caiques on African expressions; door-mouth, eye-water, mouth-water; some are barefoot compounds which makes them structurally marginal in English: big-eye 'greedy', strong-eye 'insolent', hard-ears 'stubborn'; also cf. cut-eye, suck-teeth 'insult'.

7)

There are a few polysyllabic words which sound like malapropisms, and may go back to speakers attempting to 'cut English' (to use the language in a supposedly elevated way, polysyllabically, with overcorrections): These include words on -ation (fretation from fret, frettenation from fretting, frightration from fright)', -ify-derived adjectives (boasify,funkify,

3 Word-formation and the ENL: ESL: EFL distinction

77

heatify, jokify, trickify), or individual formations like ho ganeering 'hoggish', nowherian 'belonging to no fixed religious sect', rummarian 'rum drunkard'. 8)

Apart from adjectives in -y in which the ending is certainly a marker of adjectival status (frocky 'easily broken', kempsy 'smart', laughy, leany, quarry-quarry 'quarrelsome'), -y nouns are also frequent. Whether -y represents originally hypochoristic forms in all of these is open to doubt — perhaps these forms partly continue a pattern which conformed better to the syllable structure of the early pidgin: gowky 'fool', ticky-ticky 'uncultivated land'); -y is also frequent between two morphemes: bootifoot, sucky-swallow, or in unanalysed forms: peenywally 'beetle'. An alternative is -o as in punkoman 'poor man'.

9)

Analytic, transparent compounds are often preferred to monomorphemic, complex words: woman-cow, man-cow 'bull', duck-pickney 'duckling', middle-day, morning-breakfast, mother-goat, music-man, nayga-man 'negro', quick-time 'immediately'; cf. pleonastic formations such as headskull or rockstone /raka-tuon/, and transparent derivations such as butleress, doctress, teacheress.

Words in the above groups make up only a small proportion of present-day Jamaican: most of the word-formation patterns of ModE have become produc­ tive even if their frequency and semantic and morphological regularities may not completely conform with BrE. Since full competence in St E cannot be expected from a large number of Jamaicans, some types of neologisms not unexpectedly remind one of ESL uses, such as (6) calques, (7) polysyllabic formations and (9) the analytic tendency. This can also be illustrated by words found in both ESD and ESL vocabularies — where some may well represent earlier colonial English.3 3.4.2. Krio and Tok Pisin Krio is much further removed from English than Jamaican, and so its compa­ rative value for illustrating patterns in, say, IndE is smaller. A cursory look at Fyle & Jones (1980) provides evidence of the following characteristics:

3

Teacheress (also found in IndE) was frequent in Victorian BrE and should therefore possibly be categorized as a fossilized survival, butleress and doctress are also attested in earlier BrE, but are less common.

78

1)

2) 3)

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Word-formation and the ENL: ESL: EFL distinction

Krio has even fewer examples of the cat's-eye type of compound and of derivational morphology than Jamaican. Multifunctionality is more widespread (such as in day 'die, be dead, dead, death'). Reduplication appears to be more frequent (dayday 'weak, flimsy'). For all its retention of early creole features, Krio has borrowed so heavily from English that all types of English word-formation are attested in the modern language (in the form of wholesale loans rather than indepen­ dently coined Krio words). Krio neologisms are confined to compounds, typically transparent formations equivalent to monomorphemic English words (dayman 'corpse', 'ghost'); cf. overexplicit formations such as leaderman in CamPE.

However, Fyle & Jones' discussion in the grammar prefixed to their dictionary also warns us that the structure of Krio (as they see it) is so different that we should probably be very careful not to equate parts of speech and concepts like 'word' and 'word-formation' too readily with patterns of English. For instance, according to their word-list, compounding is an exceptionally frequent device in Krio — but the definition of what constitutes a compound is based exclu­ sively on tone: "Word compounds are collocates which differ phonologically from the individual items of which they are made up" (1980:xxiii). This has apparently led them to accept a very great number of Adj+N combinations whose equivalents in English are clearly intelligible and which would certainly not be classified as compounds in English. Whatever the value of such a classi­ fication for Krio, it certainly makes a cross-linguistic comparison of wordformation doubtful. The suspicion that this has to do with the non-European nature of the language (whatever the 'source' of most of its lexicon and the continuing influence of English on the modern development of Krio) is supported by the case of Tok Pisin. Since the excellent study by Mühlhäusler (1979) is readily available, I can here restrict myself to a very short summary of the problem as far as it affects my discussion. 1)

2)

Multifunctionality leads Mühlhäusler to classify TP words on two levels: the etymological base and actual use in TP texts. It is easy to see why there is no place for derivation in the 'pure' pidgin, and that therefore the term 'zero-derivation' does not make any sense (nor does 'conversion'). Compounding is frequent, but structures sometimes conflict with English patterns (haus boi = 'boys' house', but skul boi 'school boy'). Moreover, it is uncertain which types of paraphrase should be classified as com­ pounds: glas bilong lukluk 'mirror' possibly should, but bokis kaikai

3

Word-formation and the ENL: ESL: EFL distinction

79

bilong ol bulmakau 'manger' probably not — and certainly not the Bislama rendering of the concept in Luke 2.8 as bokis we oltaem ol man oli stap putum gras long hem, blong ol anamol oli kakae. It will be very interesting to watch the gradual ousting of non-English types of wordformation and paraphrase from TP and Bislama in their future develop­ ment, but the data have little comparative value for word-formation in English varieties, at least as long as post-creole continua have not materialized. 3.5. Second-language varieties 3.5.0. ESL communities are marked by two characteristics that lead one to expect that word-formation is an excellent gauge of their status, making it possible to place an individual community on the ENL: ESL: EFL cline — in so far as its linguistic norms can be regarded as fixed or in the process of becoming stable: a)

b)

The need to refer to non-native designata leads to lexical expansion (as in 'transplanted' ENL varieties), part of which is supplied by loanwords, part by new coinages (cf. Kachru 1983); and the degree to which non-BrE (or other native English) coinages are accepted by the speech community is a gauge of the independence of the variety in question, regardless of whether the speakers are aware of the novelty of the words or not.

More than in other types of English-using communities, the data are ambiguous as to status: many conspicuous formations are likely to represent individual adhoc solutions (or adhocisms in SAsE), effects of first-language interference, or literary coinages made for specific stylistic effects — all of which do not immediately qualify them as part of the langue. 3.5.1. South Asia It is to be expected that national differences between India, Pakistan, Β angla Desh and Sri Lanka will be reflected in the formation of new English words, as they are in pronunciation and the frequency of syntactic deviances. However, there has been no systematic comparison of the English used in the major South Asian nations on any of these levels, and therefore we do not even know, to date, how justified we are in speaking of 'IndE', when indeed 'English in India' might be at once more cautious and more descriptively adequate. As regards word-formation, necessary pilot studies would involve

80

a) b)

c)

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Word-formation and the ENL: ESL: EFL distinction

complementing Nihalani et al. (1979) by word-formations not contained in the book, but known to be current in the area; testing the items that are included as to whether they occur in BrE and AmE, or (more likely) in other ESL varieties, and retaining, or leaving without a regional label, only those that are specific to South Asia; testing what words remain with regard to their regional and stylistic restrictions within the area.4

It would be of particular interest to know which hybrid compounds (say from Hindi + English) have any currency, as a consequence of the national press and other media, outside the Hindi area and, indeed, outside India. Compare Kachru's chapters 4.-7., in which he rightly says: There are also some hybrid formations which may start as area-bound and then slowly cut across the linguistic isoglosses into another language area. ... they gain currency by use in SAE writing, debates in Parliament, or in the state assemblies. (1983:156)

His sketch is of course in need of complementation by a full areal linguistic investigation; nothing of the kind appears to have been attempted to date. Since Kachru has dealt extensively with word-formation over the past twentyfive years, I will here summarize briefly what evidence his work provides for our specific hypotheses. In his classic account of IndE, Kachru includes a sketch on lexis (1969, repr. in 1983:36-39), in which he mentions a few new com­ pounds which are classified as IndE because their contextual use is restricted to India (flower-bed), or because the entire compound is thus restricted (sistersleeper, dining-leaf). He also points to hybrids (compounds in which the first or the second element is native, such as in lathi-charge or policewala respectively). No further analysis is attempted, apart from mention of the sociolinguistic and register-specific context in which such compounds or elements appear, such as the 'Gandhian' ahimsa (non-violence), satyagraha (passive resistance), and khadilkhaddar (handwoven), which are frequently found as first elements in compounds (1983:49). Compounds consisting of two English elements in a specialized Indian context are exemplified by salt-march, salt-making etc.

uncertainty about status and acceptability (i.e. conformity to a regional norm) is the rule with many words one encounters in ESL texts: attending a conference at Islamabad in 1990, I came across taste stop 'place to stop for sightseeing (and refreshments)', which conforms to the norm, but is structurally unexciting. Colleagues I asked did not agree about the wellformedness of heavy rebuild factory 'heavy equipment rebuilding factory' (where tanks are repaired); to evil-eye somebody (B. Sidhwa's word, in reading from her works) was generally considered unacceptable outside a literary context.

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81

Kachru is slightly more explicit in his earlier study of 1965 (repr. in 1983:12846), where he refers to the distinction between rank-bound and rank-shifted translations, setting them apart from shifts: in all this he compares the specific items with their Indian sources, but does not attempt a synchronic structural analysis of the IndE neologisms he discusses. However, he refers to problems of intelligibility arising from the use of patterns which allegedly do not occur in BrE, such as rape sister or key-bunch. Since no formal analysis is attempted, we do not really know what is 'wrong' with these words. It appears that it is the cultural competence needed to interpret these compounds correctly rather than any structural impossibility that makes them appear to be in need of explanation. (Such competence is, however, also required if individual compounds specific to ENL varieties such as BrE, AmE, or AusE are to be properly understood.) If compounds from a larger data base are analysed, we arrive at the same result: Whitworth (1885), more than a hundred years ago, lists in his introduction the following localized compounds (here supplemented by data from the descriptive lexis used in the definitions of lexical entries): Ν + N:

bell-music, carpet snake, dancing-girl, egg-plant, fire-temple, prayer-wheel, serpent-race, slave-king', grain-par chers, moneyweighers, palanquin-bearers, ρ arching-stove, swine-keepers', A + N: black buck, inferior holders, solar race', (A+N etc.) + N: left-hand castes, twice-born class', cold-season harvest, lunisolar year, one-end drum. By contrast, derivatives like classer or remortgagee (in: Anwádidár) are quite rare. By and large, transparent nouns also make up the largest relevant section in Nihalani et al. (1979): there is nothing exceptional in the structure of com­ pounds such as bed-sheet (slightly pleonastic), bed-tea, beehive activity, butler English, dearness allowance, or shoe-bite 'blister'. The principle of transparent combination is found in its extreme form in compounds with the copula cum, a type which appears to be particularly popular in Indian newspaper style. (The type is recorded in BrE from the 19th century onwards, but is less frequent now than in IndE). Specimens from recent Indian newspapers include: secretary-cumfinance executive', rotary-cum-DTH rigs; engine ering-cum-traffic survey. Even in words such as foreign-returned, which appears strange to a non-South Asian speaker, it is the combination of the particular two elements rather than the pattern that makes the word unusual. It is only in cases where semantic oppo­ sitions reflected in BrE formal distinctions are neglected or confused (as in match box vs. box of matches, beer bottle vs. bottle of beer) that a structural

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divergence between BrE and IndE can be claimed to exist. Note, however, that not even all the specimens quoted in Nihalani's entry beer bottle conform to this pattern of conflated categories: welcome address, meeting notice or Kachru's key-bunch just happen not to be used in BrE, but they accord with the norm, and may sound less unusual than welcomer and welcomeness, which are recorded in dictionaries of BrE. If we had more information on compounds found in varieties of English outside Britain and the U.S., we should probably find, unsurprisingly, many such words recorded from more than one area. It is even less astonishing to find many transparent compounds describing Indian designata which do not exist in other varieties of English, but only because there is no possible use for them. They are here best read in the onomasiological arrange­ ment in which Kachru gives them (1983:138). It is striking that all of these categories also occur in, say, an African context and that it is only the lexical items used in the compounding process that differ because the designata or concepts are different. Compounds formed by way of folk-etymology are the only category in the dictionary data that, even if not restricted to IndE, are likely to be slightly more typical of it; synchronically, such formations are recognizable since they are either opaque, or their obvious 'meaning' is misleading. Such partial re-inter­ pretation of unintelligible words has happened elsewhere (cf. AmE woodchuck), but whereas in America and Australia contacts with indigenous languages were comparatively rare, there has probably never been in the colonial history of English such intensive, prolonged contact with largely unintelligible languages of some status as there was in 19th-century India. Some of the resulting mis­ understandings of Indian terms were derogatory, some facetious, and some probably neutral — but almost all have gone with the culture that bred them. The phenomenon became more widely known as hobson-jobson from the title of Yule-Burnell's dictionary (1886) (which contains only a small proportion of such words promised in the title); the underlying attitudes are comparable with those towards Chinese pidgin, or 19th-century AusE — a mixture of amusement and contempt. While in cases like college pheasant (< kalif) the word may just have been misheard, it is obvious that Isle-o'-Bats for Allahabad was intended as a witticism. Cow-itch is defined as 'the irritating hairs on the pod of the [...] climbing herb [...] and the plant itself and explained: doubtless the Hindi Kewanch, modified in Hobson-Jobson fashion, by the "striving after meaning". (Also cf. dumbcow, godown 'warehouse'). Kachru takes up problems of the lexicon of IndE in two articles of the 1970s (1973, 1975; repr. in 1983). His paper on lexical innovations provides little word-formational insight except for the fact that the degree of currency and

3

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83

integration of a loanword is also evident from its word-formational potentials. In this respect, the situation is no different from, say, the position of French and Latin elements in so-called hybrid formations of the late Middle Ages and the Renaissance. Where it does differ is that French and Latin also introduced innovative patterns, whereas Indian languages apparently did not (cf. Kachru's lists in 1983:157-62). We may have here a systematic difference between ENL forms — deformed, so to speak, through prestigious languages coexisting with English — and English used in countries where it is itself the prestige variety, and where, if any structural influence were found, it would be expected, rather, in patterns taken over from English into the local languages. (Note that pidgins form a third category which does not fit either of the above contact situations). 3.5.2. Other ESL countries The material available is insufficient to permit one to go beyond stating hypotheses or formulating hunches. International efforts are urgently called for if we wish to arrive at a body of representative data, which would then require reliable analysis within the framework of emergent national norms. As regards the forms and functions of English, South Asia has been most often compared with Africa, and we do indeed find very similar patterns exploited in neologisms, in some cases even identical expressions (e.g. pindrop silence): a)

b)

c)

The greatest number of new coinages in WAfE are transparent compounds denoting African objects and concepts. There is nothing remarkable about the structure of words such as chewing stick or headtie, nor is there about most hybrid forms. Even exceptional formations (mostly unique) such as been-to (through ellipsis from 'one who has been to Britain') are attested in native-speaker Englishes (but cf. Cameroonian innovations quoted in ch. 2, note 17 above). It seems that it is only in transfers from local pidgins that non-English patterns occur. These include verb serialization, a greater polyfunctionality of lexical items than can be convincingly explained by zero-derivation and the like. (Since most of these patterns also occur in local languages they could also be straight transfers).

Therefore, it is obviously not ESL status that causes structural deviances in word-formation, but the coexisting pidgin structures carried over in the form of

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wholesale loans into the local English (with the distinction between English and pidgin being irrelevant to many of the speakers in question). ESL societies such as the Philippines are not basically different just because the variety happens to be AmE-based. Although individual lexemes of course carry the American brand, structures do not appear to be affected. Although my material drawn from newspapers is not sufficient for more sweeping conclu­ sions, I was surprised that I did not even find an extended amount of hybridi­ zation, as might well be expected in view of the remarkable Philippine tolerance of 'mixmix' (for instance in newspaper advertisements). Even the claim made above with regard to Nigeria, viz. that pidgin structures can effect deviant word-formation patterns in the coexisting local English, is not a universal phenomenon but depends on the relative status of the two. In Papua New Guinea, it appears that it is always English patterns that affect Tok Pisin word-formation, making them more English in the process, but never the other way round — a clear indicator of the high vs. low status remarked upon above with regard to medieval or Renaissance English. 3.6. English as a foreign language: Germany Germany is here taken as a representative of a country in which English fulfils no functions inside the speech community apart from limited uses as a book language. For my choice there are various reasons: a)

Germany is an EFL community with one of the highest ratios of speakers world-wide; since there are 80 million inhabitants, Germany also figures among the leading nations as far as absolute numbers of EFL speakers are concerned. All this has resulted in a tremendous impact of English, which is very much more conspicuous than in neighbouring France — even though official French concern about franglais suggests the contrary (cf. Görlach 1994g).

b)

Germany has an old tradition of English in the schools — even though French was replaced as the first foreign language as late as 1935. Therefore, English loanwords and other lexical elements are often diachronically and sociolinguistically complex.

c)

The structure and lexicon of German being in many ways so similar to English, German has long been open to English influences qua language; being the loser of World War II, it was also politically open to such influences to a greater degree than most of its neighbours.

3

d)

Word-formation and the ENL: ESL: EFL distinction

85

Obviously my decision to use Germany to illustrate EFL word-formation has a lot to do with the fact that I am a native speaker of German and have been an observer of English since I started learning it in 1948.

It is necessary to reflect that English word-formation in EFL countries has a peculiarly marginal position: word-formation in utterances intended to be English must conform with English norms (in Germany still mostly BrE in educated formal use). The only major group of new coinages that would be unexceptionable would have to refer to designata not found in a native-speaker context. Most of these words — and there are not many — would seem to be compounds of the cuckoo-clock type: but these, after investigation of their etymology, normally turn out not to have been coined in Germany, but calqued by English speakers. (A few, such as ski-lift, might possibly be German coinages later adopted into English). There remain two categories which have interesting implications for ESL countries as well; both concern words used in German contexts: a)

There is a handful of quasi-English words, newly coined in German, some possibly with the mistaken idea that the word exists in English. These include clippings such as twen 'person between twenty and twenty-nine'; compounds such as dressman 'male model' and other words which happen to exist in English, but with a different meaning, such as old-timer Vintage car' (the word was possibly newly coined in German). It is easy to see that only exonormative prescriptiveness on the part of the schools stops such words from getting into the English of German users. In ESL countries such words of 'mistaken English' would be counted as specimens of the local variety of English. (The phenomenon is evident in other EFL countries, compare French tennisman.)

b)

Playful uses of English elements in text types such as advertising, gossip columns or other forms involving verbal gymnastics and aimed at an audience or readership which can, with some confidence, be expected to understand (-and-like) cross-linguistic puns. In the specimens quoted in Figure l5 the following patterns can be established:

5 The specimens here quoted are supplemented by a few discussed in my short article in English Today (Görlach 1994a).

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Figure 1: Word-formation in an EFL variety: Germany

3

Word-formation and the ENL: ESL: EFL distinction

87

1.

Homonymy in both the written and spoken, or the spoken form only, can be exploited by incorporating the English homonym into existing German compounds or idioms/phrases: Schlafrock (3) is the German word for 'dressing gown', but re-used for a late-night rock music programme; Spott-Light is the title of a recent satirical series {Spott = 'mockery'). A somewhat more complicated pattern is involved in Body b(u)ildet (4) — with the spelling difference indicated — because it presupposes backformation of build from the existing loanword Bodybuilding, and no phrase Body bilden exists in German.

2.

Quasi-productivity of the -burger suffix; this is evidenced in other EFL varieties as well. For instance, a bakery in Vienna had produced a roll with a dead mouse inside — a case which the press referred to as the Mouseburger Case. The StoltenBurger reproduced in (2), punning on the name Stoltenberg, also presupposes knowledge of the conflation of er and ur, not to mention other culturally restricted knowledge.

3.

The particularly sophisticated case of smogging (1) uses the portmanteau type of conflation, which is very rare — if it exists at all — in German. Therefore, it not only presupposes the readers' acquaintance with the components, Smog and Jogging (both frequent in Modern German), but also the non-German word-formation pattern. (Moreover, since punning is not very popular in German, the inventor of this piece of word-play might have felt he would not be held responsible in the same way if punning in a foreign language).

Such examples do not mean much for international English as long as they are used by Germans outside English contexts — or even adopted by English­ men. But they indicate that in an English that is becoming more and more international the contribution of EFL speakers may become more important than it has been so far — but such contributions are more likely to come from their writings in English. 4. Word-formation according to types 4.1. Introduction No quantificational comparison of new coinages according to types is possible as long as we have no full dictionaries or concordances of very large text corpora. However, even if these were available, such mathematical comparisons would be of doubtful value as long as there is no uncontroversial and exhaustive categorization of types of word-formation. The most recent study that might be

88

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compared with my study — and which I have used with profit — is Cannon's (1987). He used well-compiled dictionaries, but no grid for unambiguous classification.6 Therefore, it would be more than rash to attempt such a quanti­ fication of innovations in the lexicons of the varieties under discussion when we do not even have anything approaching satisfactory word lists of them. My remarks should, then, be understood as hypotheses put forward to encourage further discussion and possibly detailed studies of individual varieties — within a larger framework. 4.2. Compounding As we have seen, compounding is an important source of new words in all the types of speech communities treated.7 There are no apparent differences in patterns, but the following qualifications should perhaps be borne in mind: a)

Transparency is the guiding principle in all new compounds. The various semantic-syntactic relations that can hold between the constituents of a compound make the listener's knowledge of the material culture especi­ ally necessary, not only in compounds calqued on ones in indigenous languages: compare IndE snake-gourd 'vegetable', snake-juice 'illicit country liquor' and snake-stone 'stone supposed to cure snake-bite' (Hawkins 1984:92). In ESD/ESL countries poetical compounds are often caiques and unintelligible without knowledge of the donor language and culture.

b)

There are differences in frequency and acceptance. It is well-known that Old English was much freer with regard to compounding; AmE is claimed to be more prone to it than BrE; IndE uses some compounds (overusing

6

What is accepted as a compound varies greatly in the handbooks by Marchand (1969 — more restrictive) and by Bauer (1983 — much more liberal). The dictionaries used by Cannon apply yet other criteria — it is not even clear whether compound status is claimed by the lexicographers for individual combinations entered as headwords. Such problems come on top of those caused by the omission of many transparent compounds from most dictionaries. 7

It is quite obvious that transparent compounds also account for a great number of EFL coinages — but the fact that these are not considered legitimate and therefore worthy of inclusion in dictionaries makes it difficult to document the phenomenon. I happened to come across the following examples, all advertising in large letters the specialities of a café in Croatia (summer 1989): home-cake (for home-made cake), hot-sandwich (the hyphen clearly signalling compound status) and icecream cup ('sundae', cf. German Eisbecher). Note that L1 structures appear to have little to do with the preference for N+N compounds: Croatian makes more use of modifying adjectives in compounds.

3

Word-formation and the ENL: ESL: EFL distinction

89

the pattern, Britons might claim) where BrE would prefer prepositional phrases. c)

Headlinese with its obvious restrictions of space has a much higher rate of compounds than other text types. This serves to show that we cannot rely on abstract figures, but that statisticians must compare texts with the same functions.

d)

Deviant patterns are only found in pidgins and creoles, from which they can spread into local Englishes. The number of such words is small, and they are normally recessive. There is no expectation that such influence might affect compounding in IntE.

e)

Hybrids are unexciting from a structural point of view: their existence just demonstrates the degree of integration achieved by the loanwords — especially where they occur as the second element — or the community's willingness to accept language mixing. It would be interesting to know whether the types of hybrid compounds and their frequency relate to mixing on other levels.

4.3. Ρ refixation and suffixation As is to be expected, willingness to experiment with more closed systems of word-formation is greatest in ENL varieties. In particular, societies with less strict linguistic norms exhibit a wealth of productive patterns, normally inherited from BrE but individually developed. In the case of the diminutive -ie appar­ ently unrelated expansions in Scots/ScE (and EngE dialects), in AusE and SAfE (in the latter supported by Afrikaans) have produced quite similar results. It is significant that such -ie/-o formations appear to be absent from ESL varieties (with the possible exception of Singapore). Other forms of suffixation do occur in ESL varieties, including hybrid derivatives such as SAsE dacoit+y 'gang robbery', gherao+ing 'detention of a person', goonda+ism 'rowdyism' or shroff+age 'charge for examining money'. However, if one considers how productive such patterns are in native Englishes (Cannon 1987), the small number of Indianisms etc. of this type contrasts all the more significantly. The same applies to prefixes, zero-derivations, and combinations of the two: the noun lathi-charge and to lathi-charge + 0 are Indian innovations, but they were made in accordance with very productive patterns. Nihalani's comment that "Indian journalists are fond of neologistic creations using the prefix de-" should certainly not be read as "Only Indian...". If the zero-derivative to by-heart listed by Nihalani is really common in India, then this is an exceptional formation.

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Similar observations can be made in other ESL varieties: a number of new derivatives, such as WAfE to enstool (a chief) are possible, but they mostly prove to be individual and isolated cases, normally modelled on an existing English word {to enthrone in the case under discussion) rather than on a productive regular pattern. Innovations in creoles are similarly rare (cf. Jamaican examples above, where, surprisingly enough, a new suffix, adjectival -ify, seems to have come into existence). 4.4. Backformation, clipping, acronyms and uncommon patterns No clear picture evolves when the less common patterns are compared in the different types of English-using communities. Backformations are certainly more common in ENL communities, where they often start as informal or facetious coinages (type spectate) which take some time before they become fully acceptable. Since, however, the assumption that -ationl-ator words must be based on a verb on -ate is natural, such backformations can and do occur in all kinds of Englishes, including those of learners. No systematic account of the phenomenon appears to have been made. Clippings and acronyms are largely modern features. 18th-century writers in Britain objected to mob, pozz and other fashionable clippings, but the tendency went on with pram, bus, phone, telly etc. in BrE. Other varieties show similar results following the same pattern; for example, ute 'utility van' and bach 'bachelor' are AusE/NZE, but bach 'a weekend cottage' only NZE, etc. Again, ESL varieties appear to use the pattern less frequently, but clippings do occur. This type has to be distinguished from purely orthographic curtailment in headlines: govt. / gov't are often used in Indian/Philippine newspapers, as are dept., devt. (development) etc. all of which are intended to be read out in full. (By contrast, aggie for 'agriculture' in Indian headlines is likely to be a genuine clipping). It is easy to see that such clippings can have the additional advantage that they make rather unmanageable English words conform to native morpho­ logical or phonological patterns. If acronyms and other abbreviations may be included under word-formation at all, then their frequency is again a modern feature and their distribution confined to certain registers, especially that of administration. Since they are easy to produce, all depends on the community's willingness to use them. This apparently varies greatly from nation to nation, and there does not seem to be any patterning according to the ENL-ESL distinction. India has traditionally a great many of these, some quite fanciful (such as B.O.R. = 'British (soldier of) Other Rank (than officer)' — compare the fictitious letter quoted by Kachru

3

Word-formation and the ENL: ESL: EFL distinction

91

(1982a:366, from Goffin 1934) to illustrate the overuse of initialisms by Indian bureaucrats — a pattern very much alive in present-day India. Finally, even fewer systematic statements can be made on lexicalized snippets such as WAfE been-to. On the other hand, portmanteau words can be inter­ preted. They are, as expected, found in advertising, certain forms of poetry and other types of expressive, witty or sophisticated language, and the remarkable fact is that they also occur, although less often than among native speakers, in ESL and EFL communities. Such uses have been mentioned for EFL Germany above, but India has jonga which combines the ideas of 'jeep' and 'tonga', itself a 'two-wheeled horse-drawn vehicle'; Philippine readers are used to their national equivalent, the jeepney, made up from jeep and jitney bus (both significantly from AmE). 5. Summary Can, then, types of English-using societies be distinguished by the wordformation patterns used in lexical expansion? Since the distinction between ENL: ESL: EFL communities (apart from the obvious differences in language function) is largely based on linguistic norms, and word-formation is a very sensitive field within norm-consciousness, a full analysis appeared to promise evidence which would help to decide this vital and still largely unanswered question. However, the findings of this paper have been largely negative. This could obviously be for any of three reasons: a)

b)

c)

It may well be that it is impossible to systematize the field of wordformation sufficiently to base a convincing, statistically significant typology on this aspect, and that phonology or syntax are more rewarding fields for investigation. It is certainly true that far more data are needed both to arrive at a decision on point a) and to exclude judgements based on conspicuous, but possibly marginal, evidence. Finally, it is also possible that ENL: ESL: EFL are terms that are useful in a discussion on language in society, but that, from a more narrowly linguistic viewpoint, differences are less important on the level of language systems and norms, having more to do with individual com­ petence. Also, it could be argued, nativization of English has occurred and is still occurring for ENL speakers in America and Australia, for ESL speakers in India and for EFL speakers in China, so that nativization is not useful as a criterion for typological distinctions.

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Word-formation and the ENL: ESL: EFL distinction

It is to be hoped that lexicological research and lexicographical documentation at present in progress will make it much easier in the near future to put hypotheses such as mine to the test. In the mean time, the quest continues. Are countries like Pakistan, India, Β angla Desh or Sri Lanka ESL or EFL com­ munities? I am afraid I cannot answer the question with the information I have available, and for the moment would prefer to base a decision on the uses that English is put to in the individual country rather than on the linguistic features of the local variety. Postscriptum. A look at the Longman Register of New Words (Ayto 1989) confirmed my view that 'memorable' specimens of word-formation ('deviances' if you like) in ENL societies have to do with register and individual creativity or facetiousness, as the following gleanings will demonstrate. There are deri­ vations that conflict with combinatory restrictions (*awfulize, *fattyism, *filmization, *heightism, *kitchenalia, *mergerite, *ovenable, sourced), logical or grammatical monsters (disimprove, *least-worst), lexicalized sequences of the been-to type (gofer, *wannabee) and other witticisms (*wasm: if an ism is an ideology that is in, then a wasm is one that is out; *yarg 'white cheese from Cornwall' is the producer's name spelt backwards). Whether all these are 'dictionary-worthy' is quite a different matter — the second edition of the OED omits the asterisked ones — because they were too new to be recorded, or not (yet) respectable enough?

HETERONYMY IN INTERNATIONAL ENGLISH1

1. Preliminary remarks It is surprising how many fascinating topics in English linguistics have not been investigated adequately so far. Although the phenomenon I am going to discuss is well-known, and has been for many years, scholarly treatments of it are very uneven, and they do not form a coherent whole; large areas have in fact not been treated at all. For this neglect there are many reasons, of which the following are the most obvious: a)

b) c) d) e)

f)

the geographical restriction of the concept as used in traditional dialectol­ ogy, and the failure of linguists to apply dialectological methods to new contexts; lack of historical documentation; the existence of popular literature on the BrE ≠ AmE contrast, whose statements tend to be impressionistic and often outdated; the failure of dictionaries to deal with the problem in any reliable way; the absence of a neat lexicological theory to describe the complex relations between words and their individual meanings including stylistic and other restrictions; and the dynamic nature of the evidence.

It is only recently that such problems have aroused more scholarly interest. There is, for instance, the best list of AmE vs. BrE 'pairs' available to date (Benson, Benson & Ilson 1986) and the insightful discussion of types of equiva­ lences by Algeo (1989). He concentrates, as I do, on a referentially based typology (thereby cutting out problems of polysemy and homonymy). However, by making the word (and not the sememe/noeme) his point of reference, and by including cases of cultural/lexical gaps, he arrives at a total of twenty categories. Of these, his 'interdialectal synonymy' appears to come close to what I prefer

1 The paper is here reprinted from English World-Wide 11 (1990), 239-74; a shorter form, concentrating on the heteronymic set of garbage vs. rubbish vs. trash (= Görlach 1994c), is here re-used as the additional section 3.6.

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to call 'heteronymy' in order to be able to bring out the relevance of the two systems involved and to describe more elegantly the shift from heteronymy to synonymity and vice versa. Algeo further discusses more general problems of well-definedness, continuous gradation and variability, applying them to lexical meaning (vagueness/fuzziness), to active and passive command/degrees of com­ petence in the individual speaker, and to lexical overlap between two dialects, internal variability (relating to frequency, stylistic marking, and change in time, e.g. through borrowing and obsolescence) and internal sub-variation. However, the different methodology used by Algeo and his restriction to the BrE vs. AmE contrast leave room for my paper to complement his article. I will first try to define the concept, and then give a few examples illustrating the phenomenon from the history of the English language, before I go on to the best investigated area relating to our topic, namely dialectology in England, Scotland, and the United States. This leads on to the lexical divergence of BrE and UsE, and further to case histories of Canada, the Caribbean, South Africa, Australia and ESL countries (here represented by Cameroon). I hope to indicate why I think the topic is in urgent need of investigation, and will suggest how such studies could usefully be undertaken. 2. Methods and terminology 2.1. Definitions Heteronyms are sets of words that are different in form, but have identical reference for geographically distinct groups of speakers who are part of a larger speech community. This phenomenon is very common; it can be exemplified by means of sets of words of regional lexis in various European countries or by means of lexical differences between Britain and America. Three conditions must be met for sets of words to qualify for heteronymy; they can all be tested on lexical studies undertaken within the framework of traditional dialectology which has always made much use of the concept — dialect maps containing isoglosses are based on heteronyms. 1) The words in question must be sufficiently different in form. (Does a set like church vs. kirk qualify, or are these variants of the same lexeme? Are eggys and eyren in Caxton's famous example of 1490 heteronyms or dialect forms of the same word?). 2) The words must have identical reference. Dialectologists used to ensure such identity by showing informants drawings of agricultural equipment and the like,

4 Heteronymy in International English

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but the problem of what counts as identical and what as different still remains.2 Also, the identity of abstract reference cannot be established in this way. To speak of 'identical' meanings in such sets is even more problematic since mean­ ings (sememes) are established in language-specific or dialect-specific semantic oppositions — they may, or may not, reflect equivalent conceptual distinctions. 3) Equivalence in the two systems must also be stylistic. A scientific term in one dialect cannot be contrasted with a colloquial, slang or broad dialect term in another. However, since heteronyms are said to exist as equivalents within a larger speech community, it will frequently be the case that some lexemes are more standard than others. In fact, there is a constant process among some of these contrasting words towards greater prestige and greater geographical scope, which means that members of heteronymic sets come to function in the speech of both groups, where they assume stylistic functions (Map 4 shows that boy/girl

2

The entry boot in Schur (1980:26) can serve as an impressive example. Not only are the two meanings of the word involved in different forms of heteronymy — BrE boot being equiva­ lent to AmE trunk if applied to a motorcar, a clear case of identical reference — but boot2, seemingly identical in its referent as a type of footwear, does not in fact designate identical sets of objects in the two cultures: boot, η

2. shoe

2. Boot for an American denotes a piece of footwear which comes well above the ankle, anywhere from a few inches to just below the knee. The British use both boot and shoe; boot is used generically to include all leather footwear; but shoe, as in America, normally excludes that which comes above the ankle. If a farmhand or a countryman generally wanted to talk about his rubber boots, he would refer to his Wellingtons, standard country footwear even in dry weather. A British boot reaching barely above the ankle would be called a shoe in America. A shoe reaching over the ankle used to be called a highlow in Britain, but that term is now archaic. An American who would never refer to his shoes as his boots or to the pro­ cess of shining them as blacking them nonetheless usually refers to the person who shines his shoes as a bootblack, although he sometimes calls him a 'shoeshine boy'. Conversely, the British refer to the person who blacks their boots as a shoeblack. The British say both boot­ lace and shoelace, while in America shoelace is used regardless of the height of the shoe, and shoestring is relegated to the description of a kind of string necktie worn out West. In both countries companies go broke because they were started on a shoestring, not a bootlace, but they sometimes succeed as a result of a bootstrap operation. A shoe clerk in America is a bootmaker's assistant in Britain even if the boots are not made in that shop. Quite incidental­ ly, another pair of shoes is English for a horse of a different color, and a dead man's shoes means something which somebody is waiting to inherit or succeed to, like his boss's job. Or what about chicory vs. endive and lift vs. elevator (1980:45, 143)? Note that Schur's definitions are objectionable in many respects; they are here used to illustrate the problem.

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came to be accepted as standard in the N, and lad/lass as colloquial in the S of Britain, the process converting heteronyms into stylistic choices). It is obvious that we will have to accept stylistic differences between heteronyms — as with synonyms within a single variety — to a greater degree than conceptual ones, the phenomenon being so natural. (As explained further on, heteronyms along the English-Scottish border tend to be St E vs. Scots; in Canada, there is a cline of standardness with a high incidence of regionalisms in the East and far fewer of these in the West (cf. Bahr 1981:48f.). Thus any investigation restricting the heteronymic comparison to either the dialect or the standard level would be grievously misleading). Further problems relate to the semantic structure of words. Most words are polysemous, and it cannot be expected, for synonymy or heteronymy, that the entire range of meanings/senses is involved. Rather, such relations normally apply to individual meanings/senses, as can be illustrated by the BrE vs. AmE contrasts in hood and pavement: hood is a bonnetlike covering for the head (R1) in both BrE and AmE, but also serves for 'folding canvas roof on a car or pram' (R2 = AmE top) in BrE; in turn, top means 'summit' in both AmE and BrE (R3), but in top gear (R4) is BrE only, Americans using in high gear, pavement is more or less monosemous in BrE, meaning 'hard surface along­ side road for pedestrians' (RI), a sense which is only in restricted use in AmE, which uses sidewalk and has pavement mainly for 'paved street or road' (R2) and 'material used in paving' (R3) — both absent from BrE: BrE HOOD

R1

covering for the head

R2

folding canvas roof of a car

HOOD

Al

iE

TOP

R3 summit TOP

R4

high, extreme (rel. to gear)

R1

hard surface alongside road for pedestrians

PAVEMENT

R2

paved street or road

R3

material used in paving

HIGH

---

(PAV.) Ai iiE SIDEWALK

PAVEMENT

Figure 1: Heteronymy in BrE vs. AmE hood/top and pavement

4 Heteronymy in International English

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Pavement can therefore also serve to illustrate the phenomenon of the same form designating different objects/concepts in different communities (cf. corn which is 'maize' in UsE, 'wheat' in England, and 'oats' in Scotland). Such words are called tautonyms by those who care to give a name to the widespread phenom­ enon. Compare the complex combination of heteronymy and tautonymy that exists in the contrast of BrE vs. AmE: BrE

AmE

BrE

AmE

dumbwaiter service lift

lazy Susan dumbwaiter

boarder lodger

resident student boarder

suspenders braces

garters suspenders

trillion billion a thousand million

quintillion trillion billion

heteronymy tautonymy

Figure 2: Heteronymy and tautonymy in BrE vs. AmE

Also note a complex case of heteronymy and tautonymy in BrE dialects. The data quoted by Francis (1983:26-7) can be selected and mapped to illustrate heteronyms referring to the 'handles' of tools (Map 5), but also tautonyms for the word handlers) (Map 6; for discussion, see 3.3. below). Moreover, the unity of the linguistic system and that of the speech community needs to be clear: equivalents across language boundaries are not heteronyms but translation equivalents. However, it is not always easy to decide whether a particular regional speech form should be considered a subsystem/dialect of another, and such status can also change over time: Scots is more adequately described as a language in the 16th century, but as a dialect of English in the 20th, and pidgin/creole languages can present similar problems (cf. Allsopp 1983). Finally, heteronymy exists on different levels: inner-Canadian variation is related to a national gauge, and in turn CanE is related to IntE, and to UsE and BrE in particular. 2.2. Cases of near'heteronymy After these attempts at a definition of heteronymy, and a specification of its existing forms, it will be desirable to reflect on what is not covered by the term: If referents are similar or largely equivalent, but not identical, their designations cannot be called heteronyms in the strict sense. This situation frequently occurs in the case of institutions: administrations and legal systems, schools and uni­ versities are not absolutely identical in their components or in their functions from one society to another. The same problem also arises with clothing, meals

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and the like. It is necessary to see that just as meanings are language-specific, since they are delimited by semantic oppositions, so also are concepts to a certain extent, since they are determined by their respective cultures. However, since a very rigid restriction of heteronymy to cases of cultural equivalence and identity of the object/referent would bring the number of cases down to very few, it will be advisable to accept as heteronyms words showing cultural equivalence even when their referents are not absolutely identical. Let us now put these theoretical reflections to the test. Heteronyms can be expected to function in exclusive dictionaries where the headword and its gloss can form heteronymic pairs, as in the case of J. Branford (1978, 21980) pampelmoes = 'shaddock or grapefruit', in which the first word is regionally restricted, the second a more specialized trade name, and the last the generic name. Does this make these words heteronyms, or, if not all, which? Testing the respective words in the South African Pocket Oxford Dictionary (Branford 1987), inacquane Dictionary (Delbridge et al. 1981), the New Zealand Pocket Oxford Dictionary (Burchfield 1986) and the Gage Canadian Dictionary (Avis et al. 1983), and including pomelo in the comparison leaves one in doubt about how the '=' of the definition is to be interpreted: pomelo [ ] n. pl. -s. Used in Afk. as equiv. of grapefruit: more properly 'shaddock'; see pampelmoes1. pampelmoes1 [.pamp l'müs] η. pl. 0. Also pomelo, pompelmoes. Citrus grandus or shaddock. A citrus fruit related to the grapefruit with drier pulp and loose skin: used loosely in S.A. of grapefruit of any variety; see quot. at withond. cf. Fr. pamplemousse, shaddock or grapefruit. [Afk. pampelmoes fr. Du. pompelmoes prob. fr. Malay pumpulmas @ Later called Shaddock by the English after the captain who first imported the seeds] And there were always dishes piled with fruit on the table — peaches, nartjes or tangerines, pears, grapes, pompelmoes or grapefruit, spanspek or muskmelon, figs, pomegranates. Mockford Here are S. Africans 1944 ... and the pampelmoes, which is not unlike the citrus fruit called shaddock. Green Grow Lovely 1951

The identity of referents and meanings appears to be questionable in each variety, and possibly internationally, so the set appears to be one of words with related meanings, or homoionyms, rather than one with strict equivalence among its members. In order to illustrate the problem of uncertain sameness of referents, I have collected from J. Branford (1978,21980) a number of 'parallels' which she lists at the end of certain entries to compare S.Affi expressions with those in other varieties and thereby make the meaning of the SAf term clearer. Branford does not claim that they are heteronyms in the sense of my paper; they

4

Heteronymy in International English

99

are likely to be independent designations for cultural equivalents that are also more or less identical (see Figure 3).

CITRUS FRUIT SAfPOD

MacqD

NZPOD

Gage CD

pampelmous

0

0

0

0

large CITRUS FRUIT resembling GRAPEFRUIT

pomelo

SHADDOCK Or

1.—»GRAPEFRUIT

variety of

GRAPEFRUIT

2. —» SHADDOCK

large CITRUS FRUIT

shaddock

0

large roundish

large variety

ORAN'GE-like

Of GRAPEFRUIT

fruit; POMELO

large pearshaped edible (CITRUS) FRUIT

grapefruit

Figure 3:

'grapefruit' and related expressions in dictionaries of SAfE, AusE, NZE, and CanE (SMALL CAPITALS refer to members of the same field used in the defini­ tions).

It should be noted that in some of her examples the factual match is less than perfect; in others, the equivalence is only on the level of slang, where such matches are more frequent, but are normally restricted as to area, duration of currency and social acceptability (see Figure 4). 3. Historical conditions for heteronymy 3.1. Introduction The existence of heteronymic sets is normally a consequence of the separation of speech communities, each of which may retain a different lexeme in cases of former synonymy, may borrow differently from neighbouring languages for both old and new concepts, or coin new expressions for new objects that need a name. When such groups of speakers later find themselves members of a larger speech community, there will be a certain degree of levelling out of the divergence on all linguistic levels, but some differences will persist: how many and for how long will depend on factors such as frequency of communication and relative prestige and the spectrum of functions in the varieties involved.

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English

SAffi item

meaning

cf. CanE

US

AusE

BACKVELD BUNDU PLATTELAND

wild, open country far from civilization

the sticks

boondocks sticks

back-of-Bourke boo-ay outback backblocks back country

BOBOTIE

dish of curried minced meat

rubatoo

bobotee

BRAAI

grill party

DINGES

thingummajig

thingo

dingbat BrE

DONGA

dry watercourse

gully, breakaway

nullah IndE

DOP, SOPIE

tot, little drink

slug

nobbier

dram ScE

PICK OUT

reprimand

bawl out

give curry, go crook at

PONDOKKIE shut, shack

barbecue

hooker, snort, smash

others

cook-out

shack(ie)

pandal IndE wappenbappen JamE

POOR WHITE

indigent white

white trash, red neck

white jeg JamE

PRIVATE SCHOOL

fee-paying, Ε-speaking, non-Govt.

separate church school

private school

public school BrE

SHEBEEN (also IrE)

illicit liquor shop

shebang, tolerance

speakeasy

Figure 4:

(Alleged) heteronyms in IntE quoted in Branford (1978, 21980) (cf. the similar list compiled from the same source in Görlach 1985c:25)

shanty, sly grog shop

4 Heteronymy in International English

101

The number of such sets will, then, differ in individual languages, depending on the nature of the referents (e.g. a large number of plants and animals whose names are unlikely to be mentioned in nation-wide communication3) and on the historical diversification of the speech community. A large number of heteronyms is characteristic of societies like the Germanspeaking countries in central Europe, which developed a common linguistic norm, and national unity for at least the major part of their territory, rather late in history. 3.2. England before 1500 Countries such as Great Britain have but few sets of heteronyms — this is at least true of Modern English if we disregard broad dialect (whose lexis is, however, being eroded very quickly). In earlier stages of English, there used to be more heteronymic sets, a clear consequence of early settlement history and the relative isolation of the individual regions. It is possibly only because we know so little about Old English — the number of manuscripts being quite limited, and most of these copied in the West Saxon dialect — that the number of clear cases is very restricted, and the few that have been convincingly shown to exist, have had to be reconstructed with considerable philological diligence and sophistication. Wenisch, who made the most recent book-length study (1979), found that they reflect, in the main, a north:south dichotomy, which reflects Anglian vs. Saxon settlement, and which was to increase as a con­ sequence of the Scandinavian influence in the Danelaw. In fact, when in ME times literary works moved outside the area where a local poet had written them for a local audience in the local dialect, the texts were normally translated. The phonological adaptation as reflected in the spelling was in most cases more or less automatic (northern home becoming southern home etc.), but there were also hundreds of lexemes that were more or less consistently replaced so that the new audience would be able to understand the text. Kaiser's research into regional differences in the ME vocabulary (1937) shows that the main differences were again found in the north:south contrast, which allowed him to identify large numbers of heteronyms, which he classified as Nordwörter vs. Südwörter. Since the south was beginning to move towards standard status from the late 14th 3

Branford (21980) justifies the omission of numerous dialectal heteronyms for local South African flora and fauna, arguing that these would have greatly swelled the size of her dic­ tionary. She refers to the questionable inclusion of such material in E. Morris' Austral English (1898). As a look at dictionaries of regional lexis in the U.S. and Canada makes clear, such material also predominates in North American intranational heteronymy.

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4 Heteronymy in International English

century onwards, the number of regionalisms is much higher in the north, that is heteronymic sets are often unequal, the southern word having more prestige — and therefore a better chance of surviving in the later history of English. Apart from the evidence preserved in surviving medieval texts, modern dialectology can reconstruct some of the ME heteronymic sets (without being able to say much about the precise sociolinguistic status of the predecessors of modern dialect items five hundred years ago). 3.3. England, Scotland and 'transported Englishes overseas' The dialectalization of regional Englishes and a notable loss of English lexis as a consequence left, after 1500, only one large set of heteronyms intact — the equivalences of English and Scots, which consisted not only in thousands of sound correspondences of the road'.raid, church:kirk type, but also in large numbers of sets with an unrelated Scots counterpart (whether a retention from ME, a borrowing from French or Celtic, or an innovation). However, as noted above, it is doubtful whether the 16th-century English:Scots divergence should be described under the heading of heteronymy: many speakers on either side of the border regarded the two as separate languages — historically rightly so even though the functions of Scots increasingly became those of an English dialect after the Reformation, the loss of independence in 1603 and 1707, and the advent of general education in 1870. However, Scots retained much more independence from St E than the dialects of England did, and the ScE quasi-standard contributed to stabilizing Scots dialect words. It is therefore no surprise that Glauser (1974) found three types of heteronymy along the Scottish-English border, namely dialect:dialect, standard:dialect, and dialect:standard, of which the third category was the most common: it documents the fact that NEng dialect lexis has been greatly eroded by St E, but Scots has been less affected, and this situation is reflected in pairs like pike/bag, cuddy/saw-horse (or cuddy/donkey), shank/shaft, ay/always and many more. At any rate, the BrE lexicon appeared to have settled for one standard term in most cases by, say, 1600. When expansion overseas began in the 17th century, there was apparently no great difficulty among settlers from various regions when it came to agreeing on what was the respectable term and what were the less prestigious ones that were confined to colloquial, familiar uses, or were discarded altogether. It is at least astonishing how few of the interdialect sets of equivalents were transported overseas. The most remarkable fact is possibly the almost complete loss of Scottish equivalents overseas, considering how fully developed the heteronymic structure of the lexicon was, and how

4 Heteronymy in International English

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numerous its speakers were in the colonies,4 With communication increasing within the British Isles and the need to conform to the London norm becoming more urgent at least for the educated and for written uses of English, there was little chance of heteronyms being retained in modern times.5 The colonies, separated from Britain by the seven seas, would appear to be a different matter. However, the needs of speakers overseas would not favour such developments either: 1)

a.

b.

c.

the number of older heteronyms was reduced in the selection process of colonial levelling. To illustrate this selection process, six maps wall be helpful: Map 1 for 'autumn' illustrates the rare case that two words were exported, and that BrE and AmE each selected a different word for most standard functions. However, while fall is now purely dialectal in Britain (Johnson in 1755 still lists the word with a quote from Dry den), autumn is dialectal in the U.S. (in particular, it occurs in the New England States), but is also an alternative in literary and formal/official language. By contrast, 'gorse' (Map 2) is more typical of the selection process. Only gorse is current world-wide, owing to the fact that this word ousted furze (not listed for America in DARE) as the standard word quite early on. Northern and Scots whin apparently stood no chance of surviving over­ seas, either, not even in areas of dense Scottish settlement. Note that Webster (1828) has all three words but possibly copied them from Johnson (1755). Map 3: Although napkin and nappy are widespread in modern BrE dialects, they appear to be 19th-century innovations by specialization of meaning (1845) and consequent nursery language influence: nappy is first quoted in the OEDS from 1927 — "Mothers and nurses use pseudoinfantile forms like pinny (pinafore) and nappy (napkin)" — replacing earlier swaddling clothes and long clothes. The relevant meaning of diaper appears to be just as recent in AmE — so there is no point in tracing the heteronymy to settlement history.

4

The lexical contribution of ScE to overseas Englishes remains to be investigated, the presence of darg in AusE and the claimed existence of dinky, dominie etc. in AmE show that there are at least some traces of ScE lexis surviving abroad. 5

New heteronyms still emerge, but their number is insignificant. There is the take-away:carryout contrast in Britain, and an interesting distribution of words for 'gymshoes' in Trudgill (1990:102).

104

d.

e.

4 Heteronymy in International English

Map 4 (modified from Glauser 1985) is complex because it shows two words, each of which have two related meanings. Whereas the lad'.boy contrast is (historically) a N:S contrast which has only recently been reinterpreted for Southerners as a stylistic opposition, the lass:girl contrast, although showing the same pattern, is complicated by the coexisting wench, maiden and mawther. Of these choices, only boy and girl were exported; where lad and lass do occur overseas they appear to be literary or reflexes of the S BrE 'informal' interpretation of the northern words. Another problem is mentioned by Francis (1983:22-26); I refer to his discussion, which should be complemented by considerations that will become clear from two maps produced from Francis' data (but with further reduction): Map 5 shows the presence of words for the four types of 'poles' (regardless of whether the pole is used for a spade, a hay-fork, a besom or a scythe). Note that the part of the scythe is historically different: OE snæd, the specific term, variously survives as a relic term throughout Britain. The 'grips' of the scythe should be kept apart as referring to a different object, so as not to muddle the evidence. Map 6 shows what the word handle is used for: it is roughly 'pole' in the south, and (pl.) 'grips' in the north. It is interesting to see that the objects not referred to by handle{s) have not come to be designated by one term: 'grips' are nibs, grips, or tugs in the S+E, and a 'pole' is a shank, shaft, or stale in the N+W. Two areas close to the divide between the 'pole'/'grips' regions show contrasting solutions to deal with the polysemic conflict: (A) has handle(s) for both (Lei. 10 & Nth.1), whereas (B) avoids handle(s) altogether; L.4 having 4x shaft vs. nibs. Since handle(s) is the St E word for both concepts (but broom-stick is also normal for this combination), the (A) solution is the one likely to be adopted, with semantic distinctions lost together with the different terms, and with heteronymy/tautonymy also being given up in the process.

Further indication that heteronyms would not be likely to emerge are that: 2) 3)

new words were coined or borrowed for new referents, and therefore could not produce heteronyms; the prestige of the London norm remained so high for 'colonials' that at least the lexicon for new developments in science, politics, fashions and the like was taken over, often together with the objects themselves.

4

Heteronymy in International

English

105

Map 3: 'nappy' (from Upton 1987: Map

110)

Map 4: 'boy':'girl' (from Glauser 1985)

4

Heteronymy in International English

107

Maps 5 & 6: Heteronymy and tautonymy in BrE dialects: handles of f arm tools; SED data quoted by Francis (1983:22-6) Locality

' Nb.3 Du.6 Y.24 CM Ch.5 L.4 L.e S·.4* L.1.10 Ht.I

Egglalon Klngfly Audlam Wllloughlon Old Bollngbroka Montford U l t · · thorpa Brlmfield

Brk.5 Cl.7 Se β Do.4

Slogurtay Porleshom

sr.s

spade

1.77

1.7.12 ha) fork

I.3.16 besom

II.9.7 scythe

think shaft shank thafl ttee shaft handle stale handle (spade) tree hindle graft handle handle handle stick stem

thank thank shalt fiale Meal shaft thafl stale tutte tieni Hale graft. handle (pilch) handle 'handle stick stem

thank thank thaft ttale steat shalt handle ttale stale tteal (besom) stale handle (broom tiick (broom) slick handle handle handle

tned mid pole pole (scythe) pole thafi handle tned tneath med thaft (scythe) tick stick, bar dle snead handle stick, sne ad (scythe) lick

11.9.8 srylhr handlet

Thropton

Brlferlen Wormlnglon Kfriay Swellowflpld Lafltrldgt

Wo.7 Nlh.l

Question No.

Nh.3 Du.6 Y. M Ch1 Ch.5 L.4 L.8 Si 4 Lei.1o Me.i Wo.7 Nfh.1 St.5 Btk.5 GI.7 Son D0.4

Map 5: Names for

'pole'

handlet handles handlet handles handles nibs cogs handlet cogs nibs handles fotes, handles grips

j

lugs

Map 6: Objects designated by handle. (A) handle used for 'grip' and 'pole' (B) handle(s) avoided

3.4. New heteronyms in the colonies And yet there was an imperceptible drifting away from BrE in 18th-century America, and more deliberate distancing from the former mother country from Webster onwards. Thus, with the emergence of new national norms, i.e. the dedialectalization of the new varieties used in America (the Caribbean, the U.S. and Canada), in South Africa, Australia and New Zealand, greater numbers of new heteronyms have emerged than there have ever been since 1500.

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However, the processes by which these new forms of heteronymy developed are quite different from those that gave rise to the BrE examples quoted above. With the possible exception of parts of the Caribbean and a few regions on the Atlantic Seabord, there has never been the same isolation of speech communities that is behind many of the traditional European dialects: the impressive homo­ geneity of AusE and NZE illustrates that heteronymy of the new type normally comes into existence on a national level — for there developed a greater tolerance of divergence from BrE, in vocabulary as well, than was common in 'better regulated' periods, where the norms were more prescriptive. It will here be necessary to reflect on dialectal heteronymy in the New World for a while. Carver (1987) has put together an impressive account of inner-US lexical variation, based on the new DARE collections. Although the numbers of words and meanings diagnostic for a certain area are much lower than in Britain, and few of these have attained even semi-standard status, there are many more of them than people convinced of the homogeneity of AmE would have believed. However, heteronyms are infrequent outside folk speech (the sociolinguistic equivalent of broad dialect in Europe). Heteronyms had, of course, been one of the central objectives of American dialectologists like Kurath and Lowman, well before DARE; the problems of inner-US distribution can possibly be best illustrated by summarizing three sets discussed in Bolton (1982:289-90): The pail (N):bucket (S) contrast was used by Kurath in defining the N:Midlands isogloss; where pail did occur in the South, it normally referred to a container made of wood, the metal object being a bucket. More recent research in the border state of New Jersey shows that the two terms are used side-byside, and for many speakers interchangeably. For others,a.pail is made of metal (and therefore rarely used), the normal thing now being a plastic bucket. For such areas the two words should probably be regarded as synonyms, and ques­ tionnaires and interviews are not likely to lead very far, the self-introspection of speakers distorting the evidence. Semantic differentiation is apparently also emerging for some speakers in the faucet (N):spiggot (S) contrast. For many who do not also use tap, faucet is an indoor, and spiggot the outdoor appliance, and many are not clear at all. (There is a certain tendency to distinguish along similar lines, but involving other words, in Canada, where many speakers use tap for indoors, and valve for outdoors, cf. Bahr (1981:91-3), referring to Q3132 of the Survey of Canadian English).6 6

Words forming parts of heteronymic sets on both sides of the border are frequent in the U.S./Canada, as a consequence of movements of settlers and modern communication. Since

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Whereas pancake is the standard (international) word, griddle cake and hotcake are regional currency in the U.S. — but ever since a fast-food chain started offering the dish as HOTCAKE (the delicacies not being prepared in a pan or on a griddle), young people have begun to prefer a word that used to be a regionalism for their parents. Finally, even modern objects (too recent to have been included in the ques­ tionnaires of traditional dialectologists) can develop regional differences: Bolton refers to a well-defined isogloss dividing the heteronyms trailer truck (N) and tractor trailer (S) in the American east. (Note in this context that for the regional speech community concerned it is possibly of little importance whether one of the heteronyms is the more standard UsE one (trailer truck vs. BrE articulated lorry), or is the IntE word (pancake, which may in fact designate different objects around the globe). Aus E is, as has frequently been noted, remarkably uniform; unsurprisingly, Bryant's (1989) preliminary survey of regional variation in the lexicon is restricted to a few items, and it is unlikely that their number will be substan­ tially increased by more detailed research. The Caribbean situation is different and it will be fascinating to see the full evidence for regional lexis collected, analysed and printed. At present, there are three indications of how inner-Caribbean variation can be described: Cassidy & Le Page (21980) introduced, as an innovation in their second edition of the Dictionary of Jamaican English, references to the occurrence of Jamaican items in Guyana (G), Trinidad (T), Barbados (B), Nicaragua (N) and Belize (B). However, such information is sporadic, and it lacks a supplement of words not found in Jamaica which would have made it a complete description of heteronymic sets in CarE. Proper heteronyms (X = Y in Guyana etc.) are absent. Holm (1982) provides detailed evidence on the geographical, social and ethnic distribution of the Bahamian lexis included in his lexicon. However, he found that this evidence could not be retrieved and arranged in the form of a dialect map (cf. my sketch of such a model, Map 7). Again, he has no crossreferences to heteronymy inside the Bahamas or to heteronyms elsewhere in the Caribbean. (Note that Hancock 1969, who provides more data for heteronymy, does so only implicitly, being interested in the genetic relations of 'Atlantic' creoles — and his subject matter is not in fact varieties of English).

the major dialect investigations in the 20th century were made on a national basis, they cannot be used for establishing these connections. Another case of isoglosses joining areas in differ­ ent countries is reported by Bauer (1994b:413) who states that some regional words of NZE are also regional in AusE.

110

Map 7:

4 Heteronymy in International English

A model of possible 'isoglosses' reflecting historical relations derivable from Holm (1982)

The only attempt at collecting heteronyms closer to the standard ends of CarE vocabularies was started many years ago by Allsopp (cf. Allsopp 1983, fa). There is no intention of creating a supraregional standard for the individual English-speaking territories by promoting one heteronym over the others. Furthermore, lack of political unity or other forms of close communication among the CarE-speaking communities makes such homogenization appear a very distant possibility indeed. As Allsopp says, "Demographic inferiority, economic and cultural insecurity [...] are strongly reflected in a lack of confi­ dence, in all territories, in the validity of CarE" (1983:189). Collecting equi­ valences ('allonyms' in his terminology) is, then, the explicit objective of his forthcoming dictionary: Where differing, territorial designations refer to the same 'denotatum' I have found it suitable to term the 'standard' (most accepted?/desired?) territorial designations 'allonyms', as being the territorially desired variants, and there­ fore of equal status in the Caribbean situation. (1983:189)

Allsopp's description does not make clear whether he will also include recent 'allonyms' resulting from the continuing BrE tradition and the impact of AmE. The latter is producing a great many heteronyms/synonyms before our eyes, but the mixture is likely to differ from island to island, depending on the closeness of economic ties, numbers of American tourists, frequency of emigration to the

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Heteronymy in International

English

111

United States, availability of American television, films, videos and newspapers, and similar factors operating against British traditions in education and adminis­ tration — so far as these still exist. The largest number of new heteronymic sets has traditionally been associated with the BrE:AmE varieties. After what has been said above it will not come as a surprise that most of the divergent pairs do not date back to the original settlements, nor do they originate from retentions owing to 'colonial lag'. Rather, most of these are not older than 100-150 years, and they are found both in traditional areas (such as the farmstead, the household or the nursery) and in fields of technological progress. No counts of this divergence have ever been made, but it seems safe to say that the number of such equivalences is very small in comparison with the total vocabulary. Such words are most certainly out-numbered by words relating to objects not shared between the two cultures and therefore not belonging to the common core which easily accounts for 90% of the total BrE/AmE lexis, whether we count lexemes or individual senses. Again, we can only state impressionistically that the greatest number of new heteronyms came into existence between 1840 and 1920 simply because techno­ logical progress on both sides of the Atlantic led to parallel developments for which names were either coined independently of each other or, more often, the selection from the available terms led to different results. (Both railway and railroad had long been in use before the British came to prefer the first and the Americans the second). It is obvious that this resulted mainly from the attitudes of speakers: the Americans rejected the idea of following the British lead after political and economic independence, and the Britons, well into our century, objected to being told by Americans what was right and wrong. Since words are more conspicuous than syntactic structures, and sounds do not function in what used to be the predominant means of communication, the printed word, it is no surprise that battles about correctness were so often fought in respect of lexical differences, with a few first 'Americanisms' remarked upon by British travellers in the 18th century, and the term itself coined in 1781 by the Scotsman Witherspoon, president of what was to become Princeton University. It was the philologist John Pickering who first set out, in 1816, to publish the first 'glossary' of such regionalisms: however, his list contained only 300 items, and not all qualify as heteronyms. 3.5. Convergence in the 20th century The phase of growing divergence between UsE and BrE and of official adherence to London norms in the colonies (whatever the practice in South Africa or Australia, and particularly in Canada) came to an end in the first

112

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English

decades of this century, as a consequence of political, economic and techno­ logical developments. As Britain declined, so America rose, fulfilling at long last the leading role among English-speaking nations that had been predicted as her fate from 1776 onwards. Linguistically, the picture became quite muddled as far as surviving lexical divergence is concerned. On the one hand, regional variation within individual nations (the vocabulary of folk speech) further declined as a consequence of increasing mobility, general education and the growing impact of the media (newspapers first, but wireless/radio, films and television following with different, and possibly more wide-ranging effects). On the other hand, much of this was international, with the centre of gravity firmly placed in the United States (and that no longer in the region significantly named New England). As has frequently been mentioned, most recent technical termi­ nology has no room for heteronymy: there is one term, and that is Americanbased (vide the terminology of the computer which has even succeeded in re­ introducing the word program into communities of speakers insisting on spelling their theatre programmes the long way). Distinctions between the two leading varieties have become increasingly blurred: the Americans have always con­ sidered EngE, or BrE, as part of their cultural heritage, but the Britons, too, have largely given up making a difference. Times like the 1940s, when Ameri­ can soldiers were sent to Britain with an English-English dictionary in their knapsacks (cf. Strang 1970:37), are definitely over. Formerly American items in heteronymic sets can replace BrE ones in Britain (radio pushing out wireless), they can be accepted for part of the semantic range (a can of beer, but a tin of baked beans) or become synonyms, with or without stylistic differences. Conflation of the two streams has always been a special feature of English in Canada. This comes as no surprise if one examines the settlement history of the individual provinces. The considerable input of UsE, especially in parts of the Maritimes and practically all regions of Upper Canada, contrasted with 19thcentury efforts by the administration and the schools to stress the British component. The combination of historical dialect and superimposed features, whether British or American, official/formal or colloquial, with different influences varying in different domains (law, education, commerce, journalism, advertising etc.) has produced a complex mixture. A start has been made by the 'Survey of Canadian English' on the description of this (cf. Bahr 1981), but much remains to be done. I have selected and redrawn three of Bahr's innerCanadian heteronymic groups (cf. Figure 6): all three show that the question of which is going to be the CanE standard word has not yet been settled (even if we assume that Ontario usage will be important for such homogenization).

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Heteronymy in International English

Figure 6: Regional and social variation in CanE

113

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Although we can speak of local preferences, or the dominance of one alternative in one region, the drawing of isoglosses of the traditional type is quite impossible. For historical reasons, the conflation is somewhat different in AusE (or NZE); it can even be asked whether the terms 'British' and 'American' should be used, since for most of these alternatives the distinction is no longer obvious to the ordinary user, even if the lexicographer/linguist/etymologist knows better. Compare Eagleson's view of the situation a few years ago: What is especially interesting in this context is the conflict which has some­ times arisen between a British and an American term in Australian English. Lorry, for instance, was once the regular term, but it has now been all but displaced by truck. Lift is giving way to elevator, especially on signs in modern skyscrapers. Modern highways are called expressways and sometimes freeways, but never motorways, the British term. Motorway, however, is used in New Zealand. But not always has the American rival won out. Biscuit, dole, chemist, and nip still retain local allegiance instead of cookie, welfare, drugstore, and shot. Australian and New Zealand cars still have a boot, not a trunk, and are filled with petrol, not gas. One can come across Australian beauticians, and undertakers now style themselves funeral directors rather than morticians. Diaper (instead of nappie) may be heard, though infrequently, from a few under the influence of American films and advertisements, but faucet would never be used instead of tap. (1982:430)

There appears to be no detailed and comprehensive investigation of the distri­ bution of such competing terms in AusE or in NZE.7 Certainly the dictionaries are not much help in deciding about the status of such words. Whereas some items are marked in the Macquarie Dictionary as 'U.S.', and some 'chiefly U.S.' (such as gas for 'petrol'), others are unmarked (such as elevator and lift, gearlever and gearshift); in lorry the reader is referred to truck 3., however such cross-reference is to be interpreted in our context. In other instances, only one item of a heteronymic set is included, the 'Americanism' being indirectly marked — by omission. However, such evidence is ambiguous: omission can also affect a Briticism. A special problem presents itself where another European language coexists with ENL/ESL, or where English has recently replaced it, and where inter­ ference can somehow affect the choice. Thus, Cameroonians tend to prefer the English word which is similar to the French one (Mbangwana 1989), whereas Québecois tend to avoid it, especially if they are French-speaking (McArthur

7

Cf. Taylor (1989) for a preliminary account for AusE, and a survey article by Bayard (1989) and a pilot study of some NZE terms by Meyerhoff (1993).

4 Heteronymy in International English

115

1989) — obviously because they feel "If it is French, it can't be proper English". This kind of block is easy to understand for speakers like myself who tend to avoid expressions that are structurally too close to their native German. Another lexical example isS A f Ebioscope 'cinema', which can be interpreted as the survival of an older English word — but the reason for its surviving is that the Dutch/Afrikaans word for 'cinema' is bioscoop. 3.6. Exemplification: garbage, rubbish and trash, or 'Waste Land revisited' 3.6.1. The rubbish: garbage contrast here discussed is generally seen as a classic instance of BrE vs. AmE heteronymy. Of course, such a view is open to various objections, such as: a)

b) c)

d)

a semantic analysis of the field would have to be undertaken in order to establish its members (such as garbage, rubbish, trash, waste, refuse, debris etc.) and to find out about the semantic components of each of the words involved; a comparison of the referents (= objects) would be necessary in order to establish referential equivalence; metaphoric uses of the items would have to be identified and kept separate in the actual analysis (but re-considered when it comes to d), connotations of the WASTE senses); the status of stylistic features has to be cleared up: what is the relevance of written vs. spoken, formal vs. colloquial, straightforward vs. euphe­ mistic, genteel etc.?

Only then will it be possible to decide which of the pairs can be regarded as heteronyms, and in which way, and to test the regional preference of competing words. As will become clear from even a superficial look at the topic, semantic and referential differences between minimal lexical items do not exhaust the problem: it is at least as important to find out about the possibilities of and restrictions on words combining: it is commonly believed that in the U.S. gar­ bage is collected by a garbage man (trash collector) in a garbage truck to be dumped in a garbage dump (landfill), whereas in Britain rubbish goes into a dustbin, collected by dustmen in dustcarts which transport the rubbish to (rubbish) tips.

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3.6.2. Australia It has been claimed (by Bryant 1989) that there is in AusE a specific regional distribution of the WASTE words, one of the few lexical divergences to be found in the vast continent: garbage bin — a combination as un-British as it is un-American — is said to be dominant in Queensland and New South Wales, whereas the other states prefer rubbish bin, the 'British' combination. With this statement in mind,8 I was struck by a series of articles in The Canberra Times of 23-26 January 1988, a week when a local garbage strike was on. Nine articles gave me a total of 79 instances of garbage/rubbish, with five articles written (and signed) by a Tony Wright. The evidence must be disturbing for all who believe in a regional, social, stylistic or at least ideolectal differen­ tiation of the two words and their families (cf. Figure 7).

A GARBAGE/RUBBISH -BAG -BIN - COLLECTION - COLLECTOR - CONTAINER - CONTRACTOR - DISPUTE -DUMP - FOSSICK - SERVICES - STRIKE -TIP

Β

2/-

E

H

C

1/-

2/10

5/2 1/2/1/1/-

-/1

Tony Wri ght D F G 4/5

5/-

5/2

Total Wright

I 4/1

3/1

1/1/1/-

28:20 (23:10) 1:0 2:2 1:0 1:0 1:1 1:0 2:0 0:2 0:1 1:0 3:0 8:4 (8:3)

8/3

7/2

49:30 (31:13)

-Il

1/1 1/2/-12 -A

2/-

-n 2/1

2/2

2/10

2/-

1/1/2

12/2 7/10

1/1/li­

Figure 7: GARBAGE/RUBBISH in The Canberra Times 23-26 January, 1988 The Macquarie Encyclopedic Thesaurus (Bernard 1984) lists under WASTE: "chaff, debris, dregs, dross, effluent, husks, junk, leavings, lumber, mullock, [...]; garbage, gunk, litter, muck, outcast, refuse, rubbish, trash", and under GAR­ BAGE DUMP "dump, junk-heap, junkyard, midden, slagheap, tip, rubbish tin, ash can (U.S.), dirt box, dustbin, garbage tin, kitchen tidy, litter bin, trash can (U.S.), w.p.b., w.p.b. file, waste-basket, wastepaper basket [...]". The material and the table is also printed in Görlach (1991d).

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The evidence is impossible to interpret for anyone not knowing AusE; the alphabetical order of the items means that semantic, stylistic and of course regional distinctions are left to the user — with the exception of the items marked 'U.S.'. Note, however, that quite a few combinations used in The Canberra Times are not listed — so the evidence is not even exhaustive. Also, not all the words here listed are found in the Macquarie Dictionary (Delbridge 1981), to which a reader might turn for further information. The recent Bislama dictionary by Crowley (1990) permits a test of usage problems on two different levels: of all the terms offered in the thesaurus, only garbage {-can, -collector, -truck) and rubbish {-tin) are entered as headwords. This does not tell us much about the (Australian) author's or his expected audience's preferences, but since garbage and rubbish have identical Bislama glosses, and so have garbage can and rubbish tin, these terms appear to be synonymous for the author.9 Bislama has doti (in polyfunctional extension from the English adjective dirty) and rabis (from rubbish)', compounds are formed with doti: tin doti 'garbage can', man blong doti 'garbage collector' and kamiong blong doti 'garbage truck', which clearly illustrates the BrE input in the formation period (plus French kamiong as a reflex of the condominium). If garbage collector and garbage truck replace the native paraphrases in Bislama, this will be a further instance of the spread of AusE in the Pacific area — another development that can be documented by looking at heteronyms. 3.6.3. America John Algeo (p.c.) was kind enough to respond to my request for clarification. Here is what he had to say on the garbage problem: Garbage and rubbish are not equivalent terms. Rubbish is refuse or trash of any kind. Garbage is primarily food waste: all garbage is refuse or trash, but not all refuse is trash, and all trash is rubbish. And rubbish is used in the US too, though not with the frequency that it is in the U.K. There is a tendency away from the free use of garbage, partly because of its 'pejorative associa­ tions'. Nowadays in the US, the 'polite' term for the place to which garbage and other trash is taken is landfill; a common term is dump, garbage dump is, I think, now rather unusual. Garbagemen have become trash collectors (which is both less pejorative and less sexist).

9

Note that Mihalic (1971) has garbage, rubbish, and trash as headwords, the latter two glossed in Tok Pisin as pipia, whereas garbage is interpreted as 'food waste' = pipia bilong kaikai, following a traditional definition of garbage (cf. Algeo below).

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Note that, again, American dictionaries are of little help here: the Random House Dictionary, for instance, includes very few compounds, and omits most of those mentioned by Algeo. Now, the Philippines: our expectations of conservative AmE lexis are fulfilled, probably with some generalization as a consequence of a reduced lexis: Maria Lourdes Bautista (p.c.) translated my questionnaire sentence as: "The garbage men have collected the garbage from our garbage can; I have just seen the garbage truck heading for the garbage dump." By contrast, Maurice Holder's reply (p.c.) for Guyana has invariably rubbish {rubbish, men, bin, dump). It may well be that there is some diachronic element involved here, the former colonies, apart from reducing the lexis, also preserving a neat heteronymic constellation lost (if it ever existed) in the mother countries. ESL countries, due to their looser links with the former colonizers' societies, or their recent separation from these, tend to retain a larger number of 'fossilized' words — an obvious case of 'colonial lag' (cf. Görlach 1987a). It is doubtful how 'American' the novelist Patricia Highsmith can be con­ sidered to be: she was born in Texas in 1921, moved to New York when a child, and lived in Switzerland for many years until her death in 1995. Her novel A Suspension of Mercy of 1965 (Penguin ed. 1972) is located in the south of England, and she has her characters reflect on BrE vs. AmE differences now and then (p. 26: "dishcloth which she called, in the English manner, a drying-up cloth"). Although the author was aware of such national differences (and how could she have helped noticing them as a language-conscious writer when living in Britain), she has garbage and dustbin side by side (p. 9) and even the striking compound rubbish can.10 It appears that for her at least the set garbage/rubbish and/or can/bin had become synonymous and, in consequence, interchangeable. A Mr Webley of South Yorkshire wrote a letter to the editor of The Inde­ pendent (26 March 1990) which was given the editorial heading "Your trash ain't nothin' but rubbish". He claims that "The use by McDonalds of the word 'trash' on its bin notices is not only offensive to the British ear but technically incorrect as well". In order to prove the latter point, Webley quotes (cites) an American handbook on combustion in which the following definitions of "different waste types" are found: Trash - highly combustible paper, cardboard, wood boxes, sweepings; up to ten per cent plastics and rubber.

10

I have since found that the unusual combination is (very rarely) attested in the DARE files. My interpretation is, however, not affected.

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Rubbish - combustible paper, cardboard, wood, foliage, sweepings; up to 20 per cent food waste; no plastics, no rubber. Refuse - even mix of "rubbish" and "garbage". Garbage - animal and vegetable food wastes.

Although these definitions at least partly agree with Algeo's above, they raise a number of questions: Can technical definitions be adduced to decide on everyday semantics? Is technical language considered to be standardized worldwide? Does Webley imply that AmE is identical with BrE in this instance, or that McDonalds should adapt their 'bin notices' to regional usage? Whether Canada has local solutions to the waste problem must remain open, but I was struck by trashbin in The Guardian (Prince Edward Island, 31 Oct. 1989) — a local combination or more widespread? Made from 'American' trash plus 'British' bin? (Avis' Canadian Dictionary does not include garbage, rubbish or trash compounds, and the item is not treated by Bahr 1981.) 3.6.4. Malta The major English newspaper of the island state, The Times, on 26 April, 1990 had a long article on the pollution of the seas. Written by a local correspondent, it reported on world-wide pollution of the coastlines, using garbage 14 times, rubbish 7 times, and the genteel debris and 'domestic' waste once; in addition, there is one dustbin and one garbage can. Although one article cannot tell us much, it may indicate that Malta, one of the most British among the former colonies, is slowly moving away from BrE.11 3.6.5. Summary My superficial investigation of a single lexical set, garbage: rubbish: trash: refuse: waste (omitting — in this sense — archaic offal) has shown a great deal of fuzziness in the use of the items in isolation and in collocations. It is likely that the terms involved, all from quite different sources, had developed a great deal of overlap by 1600, if we can interpret Shakespeare's lines as involving synonyms used for copiousness of speech: He has three terms combined in Julius Caesar (I.3.108f.):

11 More varieties of English should be investigated to complete the picture: the Irish television news on 24 February 1993 had a note saying that a "US binman was taken in a bin lorry"; I have not been able to check the currency of these otherwise unrecorded (?) items in IrE. SAsE (cf. ch. 7. p. 209) has both rubbish and garbage, and rubbish bins, but dumps.

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What trash is Rome? What Rubbish, and what Offal?

The geographical and semantic distinction of the individual items may, then, have been an innovation of the 19th century, when industrialization first created the waste problem, and societies were looking for administrative solutions, and different words were selected for official use in Britain and the U.S. Moreover, all the items listed have a technical meaning, and these may, or may not, be identical in various English-speaking countries. 4. Heteronyms in world English — What remains to be done 4.1. Λ research proposal12 It will have become obvious that there is here, as I mentioned in the first section of my paper, a field of research at least as attractive and worthwhile as it is neglected. I am still uncertain as to what methods would be adequate if the problem is to be investigated in detail, but I will try to sketch a few lines of approach, starting from the synchronic evidence as it presents itself in presentday IntE, and possibly looking into the historical reasons in a second step. 4.1.1. The questionnaire sentences Since dictionaries are, as we have seen, of little use in the investigation of heteronymy, and unambiguous contexts in newspapers etc. are few and far between, responses eliciting regional preferences must be collected. As this cannot be done by fieldwork (or rather, as fieldwork would be unjustifiably expensive and time-consuming), the best method, at least for a pilot study, would seem to be a postal questionnaire using two types of time-honoured questions. One could be compared to the sentences which Wenker, more than a hundred years ago, used for gathering German dialect data, asking the schoolmasters of individual villages to translate, or have the best dialect speaker of the locality translate, specimen sentences into the local variety. Starting from items frequently quoted in parallel lists, sentences could be constructed providing enough context to make the meaning unambiguous. The sentences in the appendix might possibly serve the purpose — but there could be many more. Note that the specimen sentences constructed to contain as many lexical variables as possible start from a British basis (the items are mostly from 12 The proposal first printed in 1990 has not yet yielded any concrete results; the need for a Dictionary of English Heteronyms is obvious, but so are the methodological problems involved.

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Benson et al. 1986). Such lists would have to be complemented by another one as long as mine taking UsE as its basis, and probably complementary ones starting from CanE, SAfE, AusE and NZE. For the time being, I consider ESL countries as recipient societies, where in most cases the co-existence of the 'BrE' and ' A v E ' terms is likely to be due to this double input (cf. Mbangwana 1989 for Cameroon). 4.1.2. The onomasiologìcal approach An alternative method is to use drawings and let the informants name them — as non-mobile old rural males of long ago were shown parts of the plough or the harness. In (1990d:273) I illustrated the principle with a page of the Picture Duden which neatly combines contrasts usually taken to reflect the BrE vs. AmE dichotomy. It is obvious that ideally the two methods combined serve to investigate semantic and referential relations: whereas in the case of lexical gaps, the response to the first set can only be "I do not understand the sentence", to the second it would be "I do not know (the word for) the object in the picture". Of course, the two types cannot be distinguished as easily in the case of abstract notions where the referent is more or less what the speaker/listener understands the meaning to be. 4.1.3. Complementary data-collection Finally, there are at least two further methods complementary to the above: la)

lb)

2)

Questions should be asked relating to words of similar meaning. (What is the difference between χ and y? Define by saying, if possible χ is a (small, old, ...) y, as in 'a truck is a heavy-weight lorry for transporting sand' etc.) What other words in the onomasiological (Duden) approach are locally available? (Such as, for vehicles, say tonga, jeepney, ute, Kombi etc. — please define!) There should also be investigations, especially in ESL countries and in bilingual ENL communities such as South Africa and Canada, to deter­ mine which of the alternatives have been borrowed into the other languages (such as Yoruba or Urdu/Hindi, or Canadian French or Afrikaans, or Xhosa). While such loanwords appear to be primarily of historical interest, they can also be expected to help stabilize terms in the local English — if the item occurs in both languages, it is more easily available and therefore used more frequently.

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5. Conclusion There is nothing better than to work on a problem if we hope to understand its intricacies. I would therefore be very glad if readers of this article would send me their replies to the questionnaire and their suggestions for possible improve­ ments and additions. I am aware of a number of difficulties connected with my query: reporting on one's own linguistic habits and preferences is a difficult job. Introspection can easily make one see differences where they do not exist, or reflection may lead one to postulate synonymity where at least collocational, frequency or style values differ. And it may also be that the language is of greater fuzziness or variability than linguists would like it to be, and that a neat categorization arrived at through linguistic analysis reflects the wishes of the orderly investigator rather than the largely indeterminate or contradictory actual use of the words in the speech community.

APPENDIX QUESTIONNAIRE 'HETERONYMY IN Int E' A TRANSLATE INTO YOUR FORM OF ENGLISH (WHERE NECESSARY) 1. The sitting-room in my flat has a gorgeous chimney-piece and fitted cupboards, but we have no blinds for the windows yet. 2. The bonnet and boot of my motorcar are made of aluminium. 3. The breakdown lorry was towed down the dual carriageway to a lay-by near the recently built flyover. 4. I wanted to make a trunk call/reverse-charge call from the phone-box, but the line was engaged. 5. There were queues of customers with carrier-bags in front of the sweet shop, the greengrocer's and the chemist's. 6. Are you going to the cinema, or would you prefer to listen to the wireless or the gramophone, or watch TV? 7. While we were washing our hands in the theatre cloakroom, James told me he had a bedsitter to let with a cooker and a deepfreeze. 8. For lunch we have decided on a joint of beef with courgettes, aubergines and chips, and for tea we can have toasted crumpets and some cream biscuits. 9. I've brought you a packet of crisps and a pie from the slot machine, but if you want a full meal you can go and fetch one from the Chinese take-away. 10. Don't forget to take some nappies as well as the feeding bottle and the pram, John, when you take Billy oh a day return to the seaside in a fortnight. 11. While driving the hearse to the cemetery, the undertaker was overtaken by a saloon. 12. In spite of trade union protests, the short-sighted liftboy was made redundant; he now lives on social security/on the dole. 13. The give-Way sign at the level crossing was damaged by a passing goods wagon. 14. The handbasin in the Gent's/public convenience/W.C. was very dirty and the taps leaked.

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15. The subeditor objected to the many wrongly used inverted commas, full stops and exclamation marks that he had found in the dissertation. 16. Last autumn was the lecturer's first term on our staff. 17. The traffic warden asked the driver to move the juggernaut that was blocking the entrance to the car-park. 18. The tipper lorry had a puncture on the roundabout just before the ringroad. 19. The dustmen have collected the rubbish from our dustbin; I have just seen the dustcart heading for the rubbish tip. 20. At the airport, the ex-serviceman collected his suitcases and his briefcase from the baggage claim. 21. The cheese-paring bank clerk arrived in an estate car bought on hire purchase. 22. For breakfast, I'd like wholemeal bread, white coffee and poached eggs. 23. The petrol station was on the other side of the zebra crossing not far from the pedestrian precinct. 24. In the haberdashery department of the chain store the dressmaker looked for a zip fastener and some poppers for the skirt she was making. 25. The child revealed that its mother always wore tights under her skirt and not knickers and a pair of stockings. 26. The headmaster of the public school put his vintage car into first gear, gently put his foot on the accelerator and rolled slowly onto the motorway. 27. His electric torch showed the guard coming alone the corridor of the train to look at the barrister's season-ticket. 28. The articulated lorry skidded at that notorious black spot by the double bend on the Al. 29. Has the plumber repaired the tap in the pergola in cur back garden? 30. The kids were playing hide-and-seek on the pavement of the cul-de-sac. 31. The old-age-pensioner in the Bath chair came from a nursing home in the neighbouring spa. 32. Thanks for defrosting the windscreen of our caravan! — Pleasure. 33. The domestic healp has thrown the press cuttings into the wastepaper basket/the litterbin on the groundfloor. 34. The blurb on the dust-cover said that the whodunnit strip cartoon was in its (the?) third impression. 35. The knave of spades was on top of the pack of cards. 36. The civil servant defaced my scribbling-block with his leaking biro. 37. The lady's maid had hidden the slippers underneath the bedside rug, the scent spray in the dressing table and the dressing gown under the duvet. 38. Why not take a lunch packet and have a picnic on the heath among the bracken and furze in the nature reserve?

a) Please improve the fabricated sentences above where you see a stylistic or other need. b) Add more sentences of the (British-based) type if you are a native speaker of BrE. c) Add ten sentences of your non-EngE variety that you think would need translation for speakers of other Englishes. d) Cross out words which you do not know in the sentences above. MY ADDITIONS

DICTIONARIES OF TRANSPLANTED ENGLISHES1

1. Introduction 1.1. The transplantation of speech communities Languages necessarily vary with the specific uses speakers put them to. Particularly conspicuous cases of such adaptations to new functions, which necessarily involve language change, are found in emigrants' speech communi­ ties (cf. ch. 2). Their speech is likely to differ from that of the mother country most obviously in the expansion of linguistic means which serve to refer to the new surroundings: loanwords, new words formed on the basis of productive word formation patterns, and extensions of meanings (by reference to new designata, often 'erroneously' in the sense of a scientific taxonomy). However, the export of linguistic items is also limited, which can mean that the trans­ planted variety, in comparison with the old variety, is deficient in certain parts of the lexis, grammatical structure or styles. Whereas such a restriction is obvious in second-language communities (such as English used in India or Nigeria, cf. 3.1.), it is easily overlooked in native-speaker communities. The early Australian settlers, for instance, had little use for many words referring to features of the British countryside and to political units of the old homeland. 1.2. Historical transplantations in the modern age 'Transplanted' in the title is here restricted to the 'modern' age from the 16th century onwards. Earlier 'transplantations' include, of course, the spread of Latin throughout most of Europe and around the Mediterranean, the spread of Arabic in N. Africa, or Persian in India, of Norwegian to Iceland, of Middle English to medieval Ireland — and of Old English/Anglo-Saxon to Britain.

l The present chapter is here reprinted from Hausmann et al. (1990,11:1475-99).The topic of this chapter was delimited by the presence of other chapters devoted to BrE, Scots and AmE in Hausmann et al. (1990); there is an obvious overlap with Aitken's brief discussion of Scots (1990) and Algeo's (1990) very detailed contribution on American lexicography which should be consulted for further information. For the need for a dictionary of Irish English see ch. 6.

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The following modern cases would, therefore, qualify for a discussion in this article (cf. Kachru 1986:130): English in ENL and ESL societies, as well as (possibly) various pidgin and creole forms — in Canada, the United States, the Caribbean, East Africa, South Africa, South Asia (India etc.), South-East Asia (Singapore, Malaysia, Hong Kong), Australasia (Australia, New Zealand, Papua New Guinea, Solomon Islands, Vanuatu, Fiji etc.). English can also be re-transplanted, as has happened to Black English (Liberia), Caribbean Creole (Nicaragua, Panama — and Britain), or American English in general (Hawaii, the Philippines). Transplanted French is found in Canada, Louisiana, the Caribbean, Guyana, West and Central Africa, the Indian Ocean and Indochina; Spanish in most countries of Central and South America, a few African states, and the Philippines; Portuguese in Brazil, Angola and Mocambique, India, the former Ceylon and Malacca, Timor and Macao; Dutch in the Caribbean, Surinam, Ceylon and Indonesia; German in North America (Pennsylvania, Texas), Chile, Southwest Africa and various countries in Eastern Europe; Arabic in East Africa and South Asia; Chinese in Singapore and Malaysia; Indian languages in Guyana, Trinidad, Mauritius, South Africa and Fiji; Philippine languages, Japanese and Korean in Hawaii. — There would be no end to such lists, if smaller emigrant communities were included, as the investigations of Estonian, Latvian, Finnish, Swedish, Norwegian, Icelandic, Lusatian and many other communities in the United States and Canada have shown. 1.3. The scope of this article It would have been rewarding to write a comparative essay on transplanted varieties of the major European languages. However, I will here limit myself to varieties of English. The great wealth of lexicographical material on the most important transplanted variety of English, AmE, makes it impossible to treat the U.S. comprehensively in this article.2 A short discussion of the lexicography of English-related pidgin and creole languages is included here, although the 'Englishness' of these languages is debatable (see 4.1. below). Dictionaries of special languages (ESP), such as vocabularies of Seaspeak or Computerese are not included in my survey. I have also omitted, as not relevant to my topic: (a)

2

dictionaries contrasting BrE with AmE, often on a popular level (e.g. Horlacher & Hough 1979, Moss 1978, Zviadadze 1981) and British dic-

The American tradition is of course excellently covered in the classic account by Algeo (1990).

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(b)

(c)

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tionaries meant for the American market (e.g. Ehrlich 1980, Hornby 1983, Longman 1983); popular accounts of colonial stereotypes, including less serious lists of vocabulary claimed to be characteristic of regional colloquial speech (e.g. Bickerton 1978); lists of loanwords adopted into English from languages of a particular region (e.g. Dalgish 1982, Rao 1954).

The lexicographical tradition of a specific regional variety would typically be started by a 'glossarist', a collector who need not be a linguist (and normally was not). The next step could well be a supplement of local words printed as a separate appendix in an existing dictionary: Lake's and Mitchell's for AusE (2.4.2.) are good illustrations of this practice, as is Hawkins' for IndE (3.2.4.). This could then be followed by either a scholarly dictionary of -isms (an exclusive dictionary, often on historical principles, and complementing the OED) or by an inclusive dictionary providing the complete lexis of the region (nation). More specialized dictionaries of non-BrE varieties are most frequently repre­ sented by dialect dictionaries or books advising on locally acceptable usage — the opposite, in a way, being represented by dictionaries of slang. Other types are extremely rare (ethnic varieties etc.). In Figure 1, the historical sequence of dictionaries takes precedence over a systematic arrangement; dashes indicate that no serious work is available for the type — but that such a work of reference would be extremely useful to have.

ENL 2.2. The United States 2.3. Canada 2.4. Australia/New Zealand 2.5. South Africa ESL 3.2. South Asia 3.3. West Africa 3.4. Caribbean

h/i

gl

n/i

h/e

d

—

.1 .1

.2 .3 .3 .4

.3 .2 .2 .3

.4 .4

— — —

(.4) .1

.1 .1 .1 .1 .1 .1

.2 .2

— —

—

— — — —* —*

u

si

— —

—

.5

—

.3

— — —

— .1

.4

* In the Caribbean and in West Africa, English-related pidgins and creoles function in much the same way as dialects do elsewhere; therefore cf. chapters 4.2 and 4.3 (and possibly 4.4 for Australia/New Zealand). Abbreviations used: h/i = history/introductory; gl = glossarists; n/i = national/inclusive; h/e = historical/exclusive; d = dialect; u = usage; sl = slang. Figure 1: Survey of dictionaries by chapters

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1.4. Distinctive components of transplanted lexicons The lexicons of transplanted languages (= TLs) are frequently said to have the following characteristics (seen from the viewpoint of metropolitan speakers: similar features may well be more widespread in the mother country, but individual deviations may make them more conspicuous in the TLs): a) b) c) d) e)

f)

Loanwords from non-English languages, whether European or local. New coinages based on productive word formation patterns. Retention of old words and meanings (cf. Görlach 1987a). Different style values, and a greater openness to colloquial speech in general. A greater homogeneity of the TL as a consequence of interdialectal levelling (cf. Trudgill 1986). It is noteworthy that dialect atlases of AmE have few items to rely on for 'heterolexes' where BrE atlases would have plenty to build on. A dialect atlas of AusE would not, it appears, be worthwhile. A limited overall input of words used 'back home'.

The fact that some of these (innovation vs. retention, more formal/archaic speech vs. more colloquial usage) are opposites makes it clear that such alleged characteristics cannot be applied universally, but can be found in a greater or lesser number of lexical items. The specific nature of the transplanted lexicons and their divergent develop­ ments do not demand a new type of lexicography, but they require specific shifts of attention in a few fields: a) b)

c)

Variant spellings and pronunciations as well as local meanings provide invaluable sources for the original adaptation and later spread of the TL. The combination of cultural history and areal distribution of a lexeme in establishing the etymology {cookie could have been borrowed indepen­ dently into Scots and AmE, stooplstoep independently into AmE and SAfE, both from dialects of Dutch), in particular the movement of 'colonial' English in the 19th century, should be carefully documented. The distinctness of TL lexicons being also a matter of stylistic values, these should be carefully contrasted with those of the related BrE items.

1.5. The emancipation of the lexicography of new varieties The history of the lexicography of transplanted Englishes reflects the attitudinal history of the new varieties. One of the functions of the former colonies, to serve as dumping grounds for adventurers, bankrupts, petty thieves and religious

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non-conformists, even in the settler phase before 1850, contributed to making the speech of colonials little respected. Where usage diverged from the metro­ politan norm, it was normally looked upon as "erroneous, corrupted, and sloppy". Such attitudes are easily explained in an 18th-century dictionary tradition in which lexicographers such as Nathan Bailey and Samuel Johnson (1755) set out to define a standard and then to 'ascertain and fix' it by inclusion of the respectable words in the dictionary, defining them properly and bolstering them up with quotations from great writers. Such narrow definitions called for a complementation of mainstream lexicography; this can be exemplified by quite diverse works from different centuries, e.g. Ray (1674), Grose (1785) or Pickering (1816, see 2.1.1.). These collections were explicitly meant to be exclusive word-lists providing items not found in 'proper' dictionaries, as Pickering was ready to explain: the naming of some 500 'Americanisms' was meant to make speakers aware of these and by avoiding their use enable them to preserve correctness and purity. Such a sociohistorical background makes Noah Webster's achievement (2.1.2.) appear all the more remarkable. Cutting the lexicographic ties with Britain, his practice could serve as a model also for the other British ex-colonies discussed below. The sense of independence from London norms which was most clearly expressed in the title of Mencken's book, The American Language (1919-23) — taken up in Baker's The Australian Language (1945) — was difficult to establish with the obvious reality in mind that English, Scottish, Irish, American, Australian and other Englishes are, after all, interintelligible and undoubtedly varieties of one and the same language. 1.6. The inclusion of transplanted Englishes in international dictionaries A discussion of the representation of 'overseas' lexis must start with the OED (Murray 1884-1928), which has dominated English lexicography in the past one hundred years. The policy of the editors of the OED with regard to all kinds of regional lexis was ill-defined from the beginning. In general, dialect words (including Scots) appear to have been included if recorded in respectable texts (such as poetry) or if having respectable etymologies (illustrating dialect survivals of Old or Middle English words). American words were included quite liberally, but not at all exhaustively. Since no thorough or systematic search of American material was, then, made for the OED, complementation through the DAE and DA (see 2.2.3.) was neces­ sary. It is no coincidence that Craigie, who had edited part of the OED, went on to set going the Dictionary of the Older Scottish Tongue (Craigie 1931-) of his native language before he started the DAE, thus illustrating in his personal

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career the importance of the Scottish and American complements. Other 'colonial' Englishes were covered even less thoroughly in the OED, although local specialists were employed for the special lexis of individual regions: Edward E. Morris says in the introduction to Austral English (2.4.2.): "Dr. Murray several years ago invited assistance from this end of the world for words and uses of words peculiar to Australasia, or to parts of it. In answer to his call I began to collect ...". Further on, he characterizes the haphazard method of collecting Australian material: "Individuals sent quotations to Oxford, but no organisation was established to make the collection systematic or complete" (1898:x). The comparative neglect of all New Englishes by the OED appears to have been a consequence of various factors: less thorough coverage of the 19th century in general, cautious attitudes toward non-established speech (and spoken varieties in particular) and a patchy representation of excerptors. It must be said, however, that these gaps have rapidly been filled by the Supplements (1972-86), and the New OED 1989, even though these, too, continue to have an EngE bias. The policies of the middle-sized dictionaries produced in Britain regarding geographically or otherwise peripheral lexis appear to have been inconsistent. Of the more recent publications, Chambers' Twentieth-Century Dictionary (Kirkpatrick 1983) is notably strong on Scots (not unexpectedly), whereas Collins' Dictionary of the English Language (Hanks 1979) includes a remarkable amount of 'transplanted' English. (For IrE cf. ch. 6.) However, it is not only the inclusion of regionally restricted lexis that is unsatisfactory: there are also grievous omissions and inconsistencies concerning the items that are included. The historical development of the lexicography of English, with its strong London/Oxford bias, the user-oriented decisions of publishing houses, and the lack of international lexicological research in the field of English variation mean that the information that can be drawn from the British-based dictionaries on the one hand, and from the works discussed below on the other, is limited. In particular, the following points should be noted: a)

b)

British dictionaries will mark words or individual meanings as non-British (non-EngE) at best. Only in the case of AmE are semantic equivalents provided; this information is not in all dictionaries nor is the list ex­ haustive. Stylistic differences (frequency; formal, archaic, colloquial, restricted to certain occupations) of words in individual Englishes are not recorded, except where the complete entry/meaning is marked (U.S. slang; Aus coll., etc.).

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c)

d)

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Compilers of exclusive dictionaries of national varieties are not always quite clear about which words they consider appropriate for inclusion and which not. Categories mentioned in prefaces sometimes overlap and the individual entries do not contain explicit information on the reason why a word is included. The editor's claim that an entry in a dictionary of -isms is confined to the particular variety is often not true. Many lexical items are common to several colonial varieties; these may also share changes of meaning, grammatical deviances etc.

1.7. Research needs and the function of the Oxford English Dictionary The limitations listed above (1.6.) will have made it clear that a great amount of research needs to be done before the lexical evidence could satisfy the linguist. In the first place, it will be necessary to have a set of inclusive and exclusive dictionaries for every major ENL, ESD, ESL variety of a respectable size. Secondly, the data contained in such collections should be computer-stored so as to enable quick and easy retrieval of individual categories, updating and international comparison. There was some hope that the Oxford English Dictionary might function as a pool of international lexical information on all kinds of English (cf. Weiner 1986), but the second edition of 1989 was restricted to the combination of the existing OED and the 1972-1986 Supplements (plus new data from the files). The next step would be to bring existing dictionaries of Scots, AmE, AusE, etc. into machine-readable form and make them available for comparison. In particular, if the OED is intended to overcome its EngE bias, it will be necessary to have in future a dictionary indicating the geographic range of words, meanings and stylistic levels. Finally, such a research scheme should include a thesaurus which would bring out regional differences thematically, illustrating fields in which the transplanted Englishes remained more or less identical with BrE, where they innovated and where BrE did (and whether these innovations are similar), where they exhibit 'colonial lag' features and where they impoverished the ancestral language by selection of certain styles or vocabularies for limited domains. 2. Dictionaries of transplanted ENL varieties 2.1. Introductory Settlement history, size of the community and thoroughness of scholarly investigation of the specific variety make Ν AmE, in particular UsE, the starting

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point for all lexicographical descriptions of TLs. The U.S. has a long tradition of exclusive 'glossaries' at least from 1816 on, and it also has the first inclusive national dictionary: Noah Webster's (2.2.2.). UsE later had the first dictionary based on historical principles intended to complement the OED, which was in turn complemented by various dictionaries of American dialect, slang, usage etc. All the other national or regional varieties have at best an exclusive collection of X-isms and an inclusive dictionary: this applies to Canada and Australia with South Africa close behind, and with New Zealand following at some distance. Other English-speaking communities are either too small to justify a dictionary (the Falkland type of community) or are ESD types exhibiting a post-creole continuum (4. below), or ESL societies (3. below). Dictionaries of slang and usage dictionaries are not described here. A proper dictionary of Black English (cf. Dillard 1975:ix and Hirshberg 1982) is an urgent desideratum, but has never been started. 2.2. The United States 2.2.1. The U.S. glossarist tradition The tradition of collecting American words as a supplement to existing dic­ tionaries (and possibly warning readers against their use) started with Pickering (1816). Unlike his contemporary, Noah Webster (2.2.2.), Pickering was 'Britocentric' in his aim, viz. "the preservation of the English language in its purity". He listed 500 Americanisms which he considered as corruptions and deviations "from the standard of the language, as spoken and written in England at the present day", and he accepted the criticism of American imperfections as being equivalent to "the Scotticisms of their northern brethren, the peculiarities of the Irish, and the provincial corruptions of their own English writers" (Essay prefaced to his Vocabulary) — an attitude which provoked Noah Webster's rebuttal in a 'letter' of 52 printed pages. The later tradition saw a great number of larger works, the tenor changing to greater self-confidence. Possibly the best known among these are Bartlett (1848, 4 1896), Farmer (1889) and Thornton (1912). These collections, initially quite critical of the 'corruptions' of the English language in America (cf. Friend 1967), but praising the survival of 'good old English' usage in certain regions, combine innovations and retentions, slang and dialect, 'negroisms' and "ludicrous forms of speech which have been adopted in the Western States" (Bartlett 41896:xiv). Bartlett's list which foreshadows the criteria applied by the DAE and other exclusive dictionaries is worth quoting in full (41896:vii):

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The term "Americanisms," as used in this Dictionary, will be found to include the following classes of words: 1. Archaisms, i.e. old English words, obsolete, or nearly so, in England, but retained in use in this country. 2. English words used in a different sense from what they are in England. These include many names of natural objects differently applied. 3. Words which have retained their original meaning in the United States, although not in England. 4. English provincialisms adopted into general use in America. 5. Newly coined words, which owe their origin to the productions or to the circumstances of the country. 6. Words borrowed from European languages, especially the French, Spanish, Dutch, and German. 7. Indian words. 8. Negroisms. 9. Peculiarities of pronunciation.

This early glossarist tradition still combined the various strands of dictionaries of Americanisms which in the 20th century were to separate into the DAE/DA project on the one hand, and the dialect (2.2.4.) and slang dictionaries on the other. Although Horwill (1935) called his book A Dictionary of Modern American Usage, it is in fact a continuation of the glossarist tradition, and a parallel to the DAE/DA projects, as the list of items included makes clear: The words dealt with in this dictionary may be divided into the following classes, which are not, however, mutually exclusive: (1) Words whose meaning in America is entirely different from their meaning in England ; as billion, precinct, ruby type, solicitor. (2) Words whose general meaning is the same in both countries, but which, in America, have acquired a specific meaning in addition; as brotherhood, commute, dues, fit, homestead, senior. (3) Words whose normal use has, in America, been extended to cover certain adjacent territory, as freight, graduate, hunt. (4) Words that, in America, have acquired different shades of meaning and therefore carry different implications; as jurist, politics. (5) Words that retain in America a meaning now obsolete in England; as apartment, citizen, conclude, tardy, thrifty, town. (6) Words that, in America, have acquired a figurative meaning not in current use in England; as gridiron, knife, pork, stripe, timber. (7) Words that, in America, commonly take the place of synonyms that are more generally used in England; as faucet (for tap), hog (for pig), line (for queue), mail (for post), two weeks (for fortnight). (8) Words of slightly varying forms, of which one form is preferred in America and another in England; as aluminum (aluminium), acclimate (accli­ matize), candidacy (candidature), deviltry (devilry), telegrapher (telegraphist).

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(9) Words that, in America, go to form compounds unknown in England; as blue, night, scratch, thumb.

The fact that only some 1,000 entries are included shows that the dictionary is quite selective, and it appears that the function of the work after a second edition in 1944 was superseded by DAE/DA. 2.2.2. The American National Dictionary: Noah Webster As an independent nation, our honor requires us to have a system of our own, in language as well as government. Great Britain, whose children we are, and whose language we speak, should no longer be our standard; for the taste of her writers is already corrupted, and her language on the decline. [...] These causes will produce, in a course of time, a language in North America, as different from the future language of England, as the modern Dutch, Danish and Swedish are from the German, or from one another: Like remote branches of a tree springing from the same stock; [...]. (Webster 1789:20-23)

Noah Webster (1758-1848) wrote these programmatic statements as a young politically-minded man, at a time when independence from England was not merely a question of political identity. It has rightly been claimed that if ever there was a chance (or a danger) of a dissolution of the English-speaking union, it was in the late 18th century. Again, Webster expressed this hope most clearly (1789:36). 17 years passed after the above 'Declaration of Independence' before Webster published his first modest dictionary (A Compendious Dictionary of the English Language, Hartford and New Haven, 1806), and 39 years before he brought out his major achievement, An American Dictionary of the English Language (= ADEL, Webster 1828). Its 70,000 entries made the work larger than its immediate competitors, especially the revisions of Johnson's and of Walker's dictionaries; the additions consisted mainly of technical vocabulary, whereas 'Americanisms' were in fact quite few. Although Webster had vehemently and repeatedly criticized the limitations of Johnson, his actual debt to him was enormous, not only in method, but also in a great number of entries listed more or less unchanged from the work of his great predecessor (cf. Read 1962). Webster had, then, left no doubt that 'Americanisms' formed a legitimate part of the English lexicon as used in the United States — whether loanwords from Native Indian or from various European languages, or new formations and meanings applied to American institutions and other aspects of the national culture. Another lasting contribution by Webster is of course his influence on American spelling; although his early, more radical aims were impossible to implement, most of the

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present-day divergences of AmE and BrE spelling have their sources in Webster's practice. Webster started the tradition of the inclusive American dictionary, an innovation that was not repeated until Avis' dictionaries of the 1970s in Canada and is unparallelled for any of the other transplanted languages, such as French, Spanish or Portuguese. In the U.S. the success of the ADEL encouraged a com­ petitor, viz. Worcester (1830), and sparked off an animated war between the two men and their publishers, in several stages, with new revised editions coming out, culminating in Worcester's masterpiece, A Dictionary of the English Lan­ guage (Boston, 1860, the largest dictionary so far, with 104,000 entries), and the Merriam-Webster reply, the Webster-Mahn of 1864. In this quarrel, Worcester represented the conservative, 'Anglophile' side. In the Preface of the Compre­ hensive (1830:xiv) he clearly stated that "It has not been [his] design to make innovations, or to encourage provincial or American peculiarities", and in the 1846 edition he noted in the preface that the authorities cited were "mostly English rather than American inasmuch as it is satisfactory to many readers to know, in relation to a new, uncommon, or doubtful word, that it is not peculiar to American writers, but a respectable English authority may be adduced in support of its use." (1846:v, quoted from Friend 1967:90). In fact, American dictionaries had obviously lost their 'colonial' flavour for Englishmen by 1860, when Webster-Mahn and especially Worcester were praised in Britain as the best dictionaries available. The latter half of the 19th century, with the independent American tradition already well established, saw the appearance of two other exhaustive dic­ tionaries: Whitney (1889-91), Funk (1893-99, revised ed. 1913). It is worth mentioning that Whitney's The Century, a huge compilation of 200,000 items, regarded a (moderate) inclusion of slang and the full recognition of American­ isms as a special feature of the work (1889:vi). The amount of lexicographical work that went into these four traditions (and, in a way, culminated in Websters Third International Dictionary, Gove 1961) found no equivalent, in the 19th century, in the exclusive American dictionary which remained the domain of the gentleman-amateur (above 2.2.1.). 2.2.3. The OED Complements: DAE and DA As anecdote has it, the idea for a separate dictionary of AmE struck Craigie when he was teaching at the University of Chicago in the summer of 1924 (Hulbert 1955). In fact, the need for such a complement must have been evident to the OED editors for a long time, considering the uneven coverage of 19thcentury American speech. Since this was Craigie's third historical dictionary

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(after work on the OED and the DOST), he went at the new project with remarkable speed and efficiency, publishing the finished work in four volumes exactly twenty years after its first conception (Craigie & Hulbert 1938-44), It is important to reread the editor's criteria; a word or phrase was to be included if exhibiting clearly those features by which the English of the American colonies and the United States is distinguished from that of England and the rest of the English-speaking world. To do this as fully as possible is one of the chief aims of the present less ambitious work, which includes, however, not only words and phrases which are clearly or apparently of American origin, or have greater currency here than elsewhere, but also every word denoting something which has a real connection with the development of the country and the history of its people. (1938:v)

Furthermore, words first recorded post-1900 were in general rejected (which makes DAE by and large comparable to the OED), slang was accepted only if dating to before 1875, and dialect words were excluded (as they commonly were in OED) to be reserved for a separate dialect dictionary. The DAE has become especially influential for its principles of inclusion: as the first complementary historical dictionary outside Britain, it naturally set the pattern for subsequent projects. In particular, the claim that a dictionary should fully record the national cultural history has been taken over by many lexicog­ raphers. After the DAE was complete in four volumes gaps in its documentation and its self-imposed restrictions made it possible for one of the original staff to edit a complement to DAE (Mathews 1951). Mathews makes it clear that the prin­ ciple of selection in DA was much narrower than the DAE's: As used in the title of this work "Americanism" means a word or expression that originated in the United States. The term includes: outright coinages, as appendicitis, hydrant, tularemia; such words as adobe, campus, gorilla, which first became English in the United States; and terms such as faculty, fraternity, refrigerator, when used in senses first given them in American usage. (Preface to DA, 1951:v).

A great number of new words and meanings, earlier and better quotations, and many minor improvements in definitions are found in DA, but the basic arrange­ ment is the same in the two books, and DA's debt to DAE is much larger than the Preface leads one to expect. Also, the omission of words not coined in America often makes the documentation of American speech diverge from DAE; for example, abolition itself is not in DA, but ten American combinations like abolitionary, -dorn, -er and -ize are in. By contrast, -al, -ism and -ist ("in very frequent use cl836-cl870", DAE) are not.

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The ideal way to be informed about AmE lexis, then, is to use both books side by side. Unfortunately, a combination of the two has apparently never been contemplated. A popular abridgement, with "over a thousand" entries photomechanically reproduced from the DA was published as Mathews (1966). The value of the book lies in its selection, which draws attention to what is con­ sidered (by the editor) to be the most characteristic section of Americanisms (cf. the 'concise' Canadian equivalent in 2.3.2.). 2.2.4. The U.S. dialect dictionaries Scientific study of American dialects began with the foundation, in 1889, of the American Dialect Society. It is generally assumed that one of the major aims of the ADS was to produce a dictionary. However, contrary to the English Dialect Society which was founded in 1873 and disbanded in 1896 when the publication of Wright (1898-1905) was in sight, the planning of an American dictionary was never competently undertaken nor was editing properly begun in the first fifty years of the Society. When it came, it came without the sanction of the ADS (Wentworth 1944). Publication was especially ill-timed because the DAE/DA work was still in progress, and the Atlas material was not yet available (Atwood 1963/64): Wentworth did use the ADS publications Dialect Notes and, starting in 1925, American Speech, the unpublished archives of the ADS and private collections, but the 15,000 items do not nearly exhaust American regional vocabulary. Wentworth included the following categories: dialect in the sense of localisms, regionalisms, and provincialisms; folk speech, urban as well as rustic; New England and Southern United States dialects viewed in their deviations from General Northern, or Western, American English; [...] conventional and traditional dialect; locutions and usages having a dialectal flavor or association; those on the fringe of colloquiality; oldfashioned, archaic, and poetic turns of expression, particularly when known to be still current in certain localities; and to some extent, the sometimes in­ separable class and cultural dialects. But he did not deal with the following: slang; occupational terms; technical and scientific (botanical, zoological, geo­ logical) terms, excepting certain popular names, nor with broken English, as used by [...] American Indians as represented in literature; impeded or muti­ lated speech or that of very young children; mere misspellings, downright malapropisms; — except occasionally as they may exhibit dialectal traits or illus­ trate linguistic processes bearing significantly upon dialect. (1944:vii)

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Atwood ([1963/64] 1986:65) voiced widespread disappointment when com­ plaining about the absence of very common dialect words (such as eaves troughs, firedogs, rainworm, snake feeder or toot). This desolate situation has been remedied since the 1960s. Cassidy, after outlining the inglorious past of the project, made a formal proposal (Cassidy 1963) on how to make a new start with collections for the Dictionary of American Regional English (DARE). The fruit of more than thirty years of continuous work, which involved re-doing much that had been handled incom­ petently before, is now in the process of being published (Cassidy 1985-, and cf. the very informative analysis of the DARE data in Carver 1987). A number of features make DARE an exemplary regional dictionary which will set standards for all future works of its kind: (a) Utmost care was taken to consider every possible source of written evidence: the entire published collections of ADS, the Linguistic Atlases, the Wisconsin English Language Survey, special private collections donated to DARE ..., original American diaries, newspapers from every state, all obtainable folklore journal articles, all the State Guides, special studies of American language, items taken from about 400 regional novels, plays, poems, and many contribu­ tions from individuals in every state. (DARE brochure, ca. 1984) In addition, thorough dialectological methods were employed to complement these data by exhaustive spoken evidence. An enormous questionnaire com­ prising 1,600+ questions was worked through with 2,777 informants during fieldwork in 1,002 selected communities in 1965-1970; the informants were carefully sampled so as to include representative portions of the American population according to age, sex, educational and occupational groups, and ethnicity (there was, however, a bias towards non-mobile older speakers of the local type of AmE). Such spoken data were supplemented by 1,843 tapes of free speech and readings of a set text. (b) The use of sophisticated electronic machinery, with programmes specifically developed for the project, made the editing of the huge masses of evidence possible — and it will also facilitate the retrieval of all the information included in DARE. (The most conspicuous of these developments are the computer-made maps which accompany many entries, but the use of the computer has also per­ mitted statistical comparisons and multivariate analysis correlations which resulted in very reliable usage labelling). (c) The presentation of the evidence in the individual entries is excellent. It includes the expected information on variation in spelling and pronunciation, etymology (tracing words back to regional use in Britain where applicable),

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meaning, regional, social, age-specific and ethnic currency, and well-selected quotations, as well as some features not found in comparable works: - computer-drawn maps neatly illustrating the regional currency (and density) of individual items (occasionally combined with the distribution of heteronyms); - extensive definitions and usage descriptions drawn from earlier dic­ tionaries and dialect monographs; - long quotes from DARE files in which informants have given valuable information in addition to the replies to the questionnaire proper. The regional lexis of AmE is, for historical reasons, not as diversified as that of BrE — as a look at Wright's EDD or a dictionary of Scots will easily show. However, the netting of the DARE collections was enormous: Some 21,700 headwords plus 8,800 additional senses in the first two volumes covering more than a third of the entire DARE corpus make the ADD's 15,000 look quite small. The selection principles applied by the DARE editors were wide: every word or expression that had a claim to being 'local' was accepted. This includes (a) local dialectalisms (words and meanings) in the traditional sense; (b) local slang and occupational lexis; (c) some ethnic speech, in particular Black English (including Gullah) and words from various immigrant languages if attested in English con­ texts (e.g. Chicano, Pennsylvania Dutch, Polish or Hawaiian). Although DARE is intended to cover the regional variation of contemporary AmE, the time depth of the written data (and the datedness of some items recorded from spoken usage twenty years ago) also make it a historical dictionary; this fact is shown by the quotes arranged in chronological sequence, and by markers such as obs. The first volume includes a very detailed introduction (x-cl) which provides information, in chapters written by different authors, about the history of the project, the maps and regional labels, language change, and pronunciation, and contains the full text of the questionnaire and a list of all informants — the bibliography of sources will appear in the final volume.3 2.3. Canada 2.3.1. History The history of Canada makes us expect that its language, including the lexis, will be North American, with possibly a somewhat closer relation to 19th3

An excellent small dictionary of the regional lexis of Alaska, based on the compiler's collection over many years appeared a few years ago (Tabbert 1991).

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century BrE. By the time that Canada was founded, its southern neighbours had achieved independence from the mother country — or had left for Canada (the Loyalists), preferring to stay under British rule. 19th-century immigration, mainly from England, Scotland, and Ireland, reinforced this British connection, but continuing immigration from the U.S. also intensified the linguistic links with the South. Apart from the eastern provinces (cut off from the anglophone rest of Canada by francophone Québec), which show substantial dialectal variation surviving to the present day, CanE is remarkably homogeneous. As regards spelling, pro­ nunciation of individual items and choice of words where BrE vs. AmE pairs of heteronyms provide an alternative, the speech of Canadians exhibits prefer­ ences which can vary with region, social standing, sex and age (cf. ch. 5). The distinctively Canadian vocabulary is not large. It consists, as in other colonial varieties, of loanwords from native (Indian and Inuit) and European languages (mainly French) and new coinages and meanings, illustrating Canada's unique culture. Although remarks on Canadian differences in the use of English were frequent in the 19th century, many observations relate to common American rather than specifically national features. Compared with the U.S. tradition, the lexicography of CanE was almost non-existent before Avis (2.2.1.). One of the exceptions, in the 'glossarist' tradition, is a slim book by Sandilands (1912,21913), who lists 1,500 words with often elementary glossing, claimed to be unknown "in the Old Country and in old lands, expressions which the newcomer is up against the moment he lands in the Dominion, and which heretofore he could only fathom by much questioning and consequent betrayal of the fact that he had just blown in." The collection is of little scholarly quality; very many of the entries turn out to be all-American — or must have been well known 'back home'. 2.3.2. The historical exclusive dictionary The Canadian Linguistic Association, founded in 1954, established a Lexico­ graphical Committee to plan three types of dictionaries (cf. Avis 1967a:vi): (a) a series of dictionaries for use in schools and universities; (b) a historical dictionary of the English language in Canada; (c) a dictionary of Canadianisms (initially planned as a pilot project for b). Whereas the school dictionaries will be dealt with below (2.3.3.) and the full historical dictionary has been indefinitely postponed, the exclusive dictionary was the first to be published (Avis 1967a).

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The lexis is commonly thought to be the most distinctive feature of CanE. Setting out to document this distinctiveness, the editors were faced with the well-known problems of definition and documentation encountered by other lexi­ cographers of dictionaries of -isms. In addition, there was the difficult task of distinguishing between U.S. and Canadian origins of the non-British lexis which was predominantly North American rather than specifically Canadian. Words only attested in spoken sources were excluded. The fact that there are some 12,400 entries indicates how generously the editors admitted individual items: There are many obsolete words (as is appropriate in a historical dictionary), proper names, a number of French and Indian words and particularly a large amount of material included "to call attention to terms having special interest in various areas of Canadian activity, as discovery claim" (1967a:xiii; obsolete, and therefore marked by a dagger). The editors were also quite liberal as regards combinations: it appears doubtful whether all the fifty compounds with bush as its first element which the DCHP has in addition to those listed in Avis (1967b, 1983, 2.3.3.) (a) are Canadianisms proper, (b) significantly contribute to our understanding of Canadian history or (c) should, as self-interpretative, not be listed in any dictionary. Also, with no separate dialect dictionary planned at the time, and no large-scale dictionary of Canadian slang being envisaged, the DCHP includes a fair amount of material of types excluded from DAE/DA.4 The DCHP is remarkable for its well-chosen quotations documenting the uses of the headwords (and frequently making proper definitions unnecessary). Pronunciations and etymologies are provided (somewhat irregularly) where an explanation is thought to be needed. Whereas the diachronic labelling (Hist., Obs.) is adequate throughout, and the restricted currency within Canada is indicated for words known to be local, references to DAE/DA, OED and OEDS are missing. It might have been worthwhile to indicate by a symbol at least those words whose Canadianness is shown by their absence from dictionaries published outside Canada, or marked 'Can.' in these. The publication of the DNflE (2.3.4.) and of the DARE (2.2.4.) will mean that the editorial staff will have to consider the following points (if a second edition is envisaged). Should DNflE information be duplicated? Should attestation in DARE affect the inclusion of words in the DCHP? It would also be interesting to see whether the results of the Survey of Canadian English should be included, and in what form. There is also an abridgement (Avis 1973) which does not claim to add any new information but is intended to provide an easily available reference book 4

The number of dialect words is, however, not large; there cannot be more than, say, 200 Newfoundlandisms compared to 5,000 in the DNflE (2.3.4.).

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"used in classrooms as a teaching dictionary in courses dealing with Canadian English, in Canadian literature, and also in courses dealing specifically with the history of Canadian speech" (p. vii). The form of the entries is identical with those in DCHP, but their number has been reduced to about a third overall (e.g., the number of bush-compounds is down from some 60 to 13). 2.3.3. The inclusive dictionaries A series of dictionaries meant for use in Canadian schools and universities, on various levels, has been published by Gage, Toronto, from 1967 onward. Only the largest of these (of which the smaller books are abridgements) will be considered here. This was first published as Avis (1967b). Its 40,000 entries (some 3,000 added in the final revision) bring the dictionary up to the level of American desk or college dictionaries or the MacqD (Delbridge 1981) with which Avis (1967b) has the closest typological similarity. The Canadian element (marked Cdn. if thought to be restricted to CanE usage) is fully integrated, "bearing testimony to the customs and interests of Canadians. It is thus a catalogue of things relevant to Canadians in the 1980s and contains some clues to the nature of the Canadian identity" (flap). As a dictionary of living usage, it leaves out many of the entries of the exclusive dictionary (2.3.2.), but its Canadianness is much more evident than, for instance, that of Morris (1969). All the Canadian dictionaries mentioned above include clear advice on usage (most prescriptively Morris 1969).5 2.3.4. The dialect dictionary The comparatively recent history of CanE leads one to expect that regional variation of the traditional 'dialectal' type will not be considerable — except for Newfoundland and the Maritimes, settled from the 16th century onwards and early separated from 'Upper Canada'. The political separateness of the region (Newfoundland became the tenth province of the Canadian state as late as 1949) added to its economic and cultural isolation, as did the lack of internal com­ munication: Until recent decades the greatest numbers of people employing folk and com­ mon speech in Newfoundland — the 'livyers' in the 'outports' — have lived in the string of settlements around the circumference of the island, along the coasts of the economically all-important bays. For most of their history, the

5

A new inclusive dictionary is in preparation for Oxford University Press (general editor: K. Barber), but nothing has been published to date.

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islanders have inhabited primarily the narrow and long coastal perimeter of some 6,000 deeply indented bays and inlets [...]. (Story 1982:xv)

It is therefore no surprise that a dialect dictionary was first produced for Newfoundland (Story 1982) and that a smaller one was compiled for the neigh­ bouring Prince Edward Island (Pratt 1988) — the two may well remain the only ones, at least on this scholarly level, for Canada. The DNflE contains some 5,000 entries, collected from printed sources (travelogues, diaries and, from 1807 on, pamphlets, books and ephemeral publications from local presses as well as the glossarists, 1792-1955), from historical manuscripts, field records and the invaluable collections of the Memorial University of Newfoundland Folklore and Language Archive. In a culture so much determined by oral use of speech, the editors fully en­ countered the problem that lexicographers of, for instance, Jamaican had to face: the inclusion of the spoken record in a historical dictionary (cf. balliclatter). The entries are painstakingly exhaustive as regards pronunciations, meanings, references to synonyms and very extensive quotations. Moreover, references to the OED, DAE, and DA and DCHP (cf. bank) very clearly demonstrate the complementary character of the DNflE; the very thorough references to the EDD document the large component of West Country and Hiberno-English lexis. (It is a pity that the editors refrain from giving any information on the regional distribution of items within Newfoundland: this could have shown the corre­ lation of such words with the ethnic background of individual settlements.) 2.4. Australia and New Zealand 2.4.1. History "English Transported" is the title of an important collection of essays on AusE (Ramson 1970) — not 'transplanted', but 'carried into banishment, as a criminal to a penal colony' (Macquarie Dictionary's definition). Australia's disreputable linguistic past has been frequently exaggerated (as has the fact that not all parts of Australia and none of New Zealand received convict shipments from London), but it would be very superficial to stress only the one component of Australian society and her national form of English: It is important that the pattern of early Australian English is seen [...] as a reshuffling of an existing English pattern in which various nuclei — the slang and dialect vocabularies of London and the industrial Midlands, the slang of convicts, and the more conservative English of the administrators and the military — are set off in a new relationship one against the other. (Ramson 1966:49-50)

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In fact the much-noted homogeneity of AusE is even more remarkable than the slangy character of some of the more colloquial English used in the country. For instance, the Irish who made up between a third and a half of various immigrant groups in the 19th century do not appear to have left any conspicuous mark on AusE, certainly not on the vocabulary. It is easy to see why there was no serious lexicography in 19th-century Australia: the respectable forms of speech were felt to be too close to BrE to justify such a compilation, and the slang was not worthy of scholarly documen­ tation. The same applies to New Zealand, only that speakers of 19th-century NZE would have felt their language even closer to 'proper' BrE, and there would have been less slang. 2.4.2. The historical dictionary Forerunners only covered Australian slang (2.4.4.) — the 'serious' lexicography of AusE started as a spin-off of the OED. Morris, who was asked to collaborate, would have wished to have his native variety fully and systematically repre­ sented in the OED or have a supplement compiled on the OED principles. He ended up attempting, with insufficient means, the second possibility (Morris 1898). Despite its flaws (cf. Ramson 1966:16-18), Morris' dictionary is a remarkable achievement for a one-man effort. In particular, the careful definitions and the documentation deserve high praise. Although he gave excessive room to designations of fauna and flora, he did not include more than ca. 1,800 words (a number which is quite low compared with AND's total of 6,000). In particular, specific Australian meanings are only incompletely covered (entries for Aboriginal and abolitionist are conspicuously absent before Morris' first entry, absentee). Morris has given much greater room to quotations than would have been necessary to illustrate meaning and usage, but this fact makes his book a mine of historical information on 19th-century Australia. Of the 90 combinations with native (type native bear = koala) only 20 are still current according to the Macquarie Dictionary (2.4.3.) — an indication of the value of the historical linguistic information contained in the book. Two substantial contributions did not result in independent dictionaries, but were written as supplements to existing dictionaries: Joshua Lake compiled one for Webster's Dictionary (1898), and A.G. Mitchell a "Supplement of Australian and New Zealand Words" for the Australian edition of Chambers' Shorter English Dictionary. Both concentrated on the current diction, Lake thus serving as an interesting corrective on AusE usage of the late 19th century (cf. Ramson 1966:16-18, 30f.).

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The 20th century has seen mainly ephemeral lexicographical work on AusE, before research started anew in the 1960s. The only exception is S.J. Baker's The Australian Language (1945), which is not in the form of a dictionary and is of varying quality, but which contains a great amount of lexical material supplementing or correcting Morris (cf. Ramson 1966:26-29). Renewed lexicographical research especially at the universities of Sydney, Macquarie and Canberra has produced a series of smaller monographs on AusE lexis and Australia's first full inclusive dictionary (2.4.3.); above all, it has made possible the publication of Australia's definitive historical dictionary, a worthy contribution to the bicentenary celebrations (Ramson 1988 = AND). The aim of this great exclusive dictionary of some 6,000 entries (plus combinations) is to complement the OED — as is obvious from AND's subtitle "A Dictionary of Australianisms on Historical Principles" and the lexico­ graphical method throughout, which guarantees that its data are fully comparable with the OED (and can be combined with them in electronic form). In the principles of selection the AND recalls the DAE/DA (2.2.3.), providing not only authoritative definitions of words which originated in Australia or developed specific Australian meanings, but also a great deal of evidence of national history, folklore and character, especially in the lavish supply of quotations. A great amount of colloquial vocabulary is included, but regionally restricted words frequently are not, information on dialect lexis not being available in sufficient detail. 2.4.3. The inclusive dictionaries A number of publishers have, in the course of the last few years, produced inclusive dictionaries for the Australian and the New Zealand market respec­ tively. The adaptation of the international (or rather British-based) lexicon to the specific local needs has, however, been more or less superficial (cf. Turner 2 1984, Burchfield 1986, 2.4.5. below). It is obvious that only a new compilation based on Australian/New Zealand sources, with definitions written by Anti­ podean lexicographers, could claim to reflect the reality of the English used in the region, something similar to what Avis and his team did for Canada (2.2.2.). Such a project was very carefully planned and meticulously carried out by the linguists of Macquarie University. It appeared as Delbridge (1981). Though based on the Encyclopedic World Dictionary (Hanks 1971), the published work is more or less a new work, the first to illustrate AusE usage of the modern age. In 80,000 entries the editors provide exhaustive and clear information for the Australian user. The editors removed most encyclopedic entries (re-admitted in 21992) and words of regional interest (Scottish, American,

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African etc.). Meanings were tested as to whether they represent current AusE usage, and words from many particular groups added ("the flowerchild, the Jesusfreak, the groupie, the acidhead, [...]," 13). A substantial number of New Zealand words and senses was supplied by Orsman. Usage labels are reduced to 'colloq.' (which includes what other dictionaries might well label 'informal, slang, vulgar, taboo, illiterate, sub- or non-standard') or non-marking for the general lexis. Meant for the present-day Australian user, the dictionary does not provide historical information, nor is the Australian component of the book explicitly shown — this is the objective of the AND (2.4.2.). 2.4.4. Cant, slang and colloquialisms AusE has for a long time been credited with being particularly rich in slang, and while the formal written language has in many ways stayed close to respectable BrE, colourful colloquial language (often originating in informal 19th-century BrE) has been considered as the most conspicuous area of distinctively AusE vocabulary. Not surprisingly, then, the history of AusE lexicography begins with slang (or rather, criminal cant): J.H. Vaux collected "A New and Comprehensive Vocabulary of the Flash Language" as early as 1812, a mere 24 years after the settlement of Botany Bay, and a number of mostly superficial slang dictionaries appeared in the late 19th and early 20th century (cf. the survey in Ramson 1966:10-15, 20-24). The most remarkable among them is possibly Lentzner (1891). This includes a selection of "Australian and Bush Slang" (1-50), but also shorter word-lists of Anglo-Indian (53-77), Caribbean (95-98) and South African (101f.) slang and of Chinese Pidgin (81-92), and an appendix of extracts from articles on these varieties (Ramson 1966:14-15). Later on, Australian slang and informal English are included in Partridge's collections, but the first proper dic­ tionary devoted to the topic is Wilkes (1978). Some 1,500 expressions which could alternatively be labelled cant, slang, colloquialisms, well-worn clichés, or proverbial sayings, are here assembled as 'colloquialisms'; items were included if they originated in Australia or, more frequently, are of greater currency there than in other countries. The inter­ national character of some more recent expressions, and the strong London connections of earlier ones, make a watertight distinction impracticable, as Wilkes readily admits. All items are carefully documented from printed sources — which may be many years later than the first occurrence in spoken form. The collection is a remarkable achievement for one man, not a linguist or lexicog­ rapher himself, and though most of his items are now also found in the MacqD

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(2.3.3.), Wilkes' book still remains a mine of information on the most pic­ turesque and distinctive part of AusE lexis. 2.4.5. New Zealand New Zealand and its specific form of English have always been overshadowed by its big neighbour. In fact, syntactical and phonological differences between the two national varieties are minimal, and they are not large as far as the lexis is concerned, either: there is probably more that sets off the two varieties jointly from other Englishes than what keeps them apart. Unsurprisingly, NZE was traditionally subsumed under AusE, possibly under the term 'Australasian', as in Morris (1898). In the absence of an independent lexicographical tradition, only two small-size dictionaries carrying 'New Zealand' in their titles deserve mention: Orsman (1979), which is the international Heinemann dictionary with minor local modifications (cf. the Australian counterpart, Harber 1976), and Burchfield (1986): This new adaptation follows the pattern of George W. Turner's Australian Pocket Oxford Dictionary (Sydney, 21984). A striking feature of this modest dictionary is the Introduction in English and in Maori. Burchfield, who had the opportunity to draw from the vast OED files items marked 'NZE' or 'AusE', has added up to 1,000 words "distinctive to New Zealand (or shared only with Australia)", and he has removed a great many others that appeared less relevant for Antipodean users. A comparison of the two dictionaries is difficult since they are based on quite different works. A fanciful pronunciation transliteration in the HNZD contrasts with IPA in NZPOD, which also has in its favour a much larger number of head-words and nested derivations (on fewer pages) —■ and an apparently consistent labelling of 'NZ', 'AusE', or 'NZ and AusE' words and meanings: an innovation that may betray the Oxford basis and viewpoint, but is certainly worth copying. However, both books are adaptations — they cannot (and do not claim to) compare with the lexicographical standard set by the MacqD. A set of full exclusive and inclusive dictionaries of NZE remains to be written — the long-expected historical dictionary by H. Orsman has still not been published. In the meantime we have to make do with a smaller and less ambitious dictionary of New Zealandisms (Orsman & Orsman 1994). This includes some 4,500 words considered to be "distinctively, and often exclusively, part of the spoken or written language of English-speaking New Zealanders" (preface), comprising all varieties ranging from historical to present-day usage, regional and specialist, colloquial and formal — but normally without labelling the items as such. The most obvious omission is that there is no indication of which words are shared with AusE.

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2.5. South Africa 2.5.1. History The history of South Africa makes it clear that the status and the forms of English will be different from those in other ENL countries. When the Cape Province was conquered by the English in 1802, they met with Cape Dutch (later to be termed Afrikaans) and various Hottentot and Bantu languages. The anglicization of this country was never as thorough as in other ENL settler states, and today English is the native language only of 1.5 million inhabitants, some 40% of the white population, and only 6% of the entire population. Its numerical minority status, though with high prestige and very widespread second-language functions, makes it more open to loan influences than, say, CanE or UsE: individual bilingualism among whites is exceptionally high, and codeswitching consequently very common. This means that a very great number of Afrikaans words are found in 'white' English contexts, and those of Indian and Bantu origin in others. Obviously, the situation for SAfE lexicography is much closer to that prevalent in ESL communities (such as IndE) than to that in more or less monolingual ENL countries. Interference especially from Afrikaans appears to be an old phenomenon, as testified by Pettman (2.5.2.). A strong concern for correctness is apparently alive in Beeton & Dorner's DEUSA (2.5.4.), whereas the descriptive/historical lexicographers see their task in docu­ menting the existing situation. 2.5.2. The glossarist tradition Only one dictionary compiled by a gentleman-lexicographer, who felt an obligation to stem the flood of corruptions infecting the SAf variety of colonial English (mainly as a consequence of influences from the other Germanic language, Afrikaans) deserves to be mentioned (Pettman 1913). Despite its shortcomings in lexicographical method, the dictionary, with the (separately published) supplements by C.P. Swart (1934) and by M.D.W. Jeffreys (1964, 1967, 1970) comprising some 4,300 entries, was the most com­ prehensive collection of the lexis ofS A f Ebefore the more recent dictionaries edited by the Branfords (2.5.3.).6

6

Mesthrie's (1992) 'ethnic' dictionary, which assembles some 1.000 items of Indian provenance, should probably be added here although its focus is different.

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2.5.3. The historical dictionary An updating of Pettman's dictionary was not a satisfactory solution; therefore, the lexicography of S Affi was put on reliable foundations only with the research undertaken at the Institute for the Study of English in Africa at Rhodes Uni­ versity, Grahamstown, in 1970. The first sizeable result of these efforts was J. Branford (1978). This small dictionary (some 3,500 entries in the second to fourth editions) is in some ways a forerunner to the larger OED-type work begun by her husband. The handy size of the DSAfE made an expanded version possible after two years, followed by two further editions in quick succession, thus illustrating the advantages of a more modest book. J. Branford rightly (largely) excluded names for South African plants and animals, the type of lexis that usually predominates in 'glossaries'. On the other hand, the high proportion of words from Afrikaans which can only marginally be considered English even where they occur (ital­ icized) in an English text, and the even more marginal items from Bantu languages, many illustrating African beliefs, institutions, etc., push into the background what local SAffi lexis there is: new word-formations (many of them calqued on Afrikaans), new meanings (many from the political sphere which found international attention, and are now 'obs.' or 'hist.', such as ban, home­ land, or township) — and the many words from Afrikaans that have become fully integrated into the English language. The major problem for lexicographers was and still is that the use of English means different things to different groups, and the English used by National Servicemen has little to do with that used in the black townships, lexically and otherwise. The dictionary was com­ piled, edited and updated with exemplary care: the selection of headwords, their pronunciation, meaning and usage labels, provenance and alternative expressions are accompanied by skilfully chosen quotations, with source and date. Two preliminary versions of parts of the DSAfEHP containing descriptions of the project and a provisional dictionary have prepared the way for final pub­ lication; both were meant for internal use (also serving as progress reports), and only their introductions are accessible to me (Branford et al. 1976, 1984). Voorloper contained the more central items for which enough documentation was available in 1976 for an initial presentation on historical principles, whereas the complementary list in Agterryer contains a much higher proportion of loanwords and other more marginal words. Together with a few more recent additions, they bring the DSAfEHP total to some 3,000 entries. (The Voorloper estimates were 5,-15,000.) When it became clear that the dictionary was to be published by Oxford University Press, conventions were changed to make

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entries completely computer-compatible with those in the OED(S); this meant some 're-nesting' and the use of some alternative abbreviations. The DSAfEHP will rely almost exclusively on printed evidence (but will include a fair number of settlers' and missionaries' diaries and also a few items only recorded from oral sources). Field surveys of spoken usage will, however, not be possible until after the completion of the dictionary. 'SAfE' is negatively defined by the editors as non-BrE and non-American; since the distribution of items in overseas Englishes is largely unsettled, the editors have decided to include words and expressions which SAfE shares with, say, AusE, IndE or CarE. In contrast to the smaller DSAfE, the dictionary will include a fair amount of specialized vocabulary (e.g. some 70 names of birds and 56 of trees), but omit proper names. (The dictionary, under the editorship of P. Silva, is now expected for 1996.) No dialect dictionary of SAfE has appeared, and the regional distictions not being conspicuous, none is likely to be attempted. However, there may be, in due course, one of the English used by Black Africans. One of the smaller ethnic groups, the Indians, has recently been covered by Mesthrie (1992). Written as a supplement to J. Branford (21980) the compilation covers the entire range of specifically IndE lexis, concentrating on informal spoken usage. Mesthrie grouped his items into several categories and arranged them in separate sections, viz.:"Items used by most speakers, irrespective of ancestral language" (1-50), "Items limited to certain subgroups, dependant upon ancestral languages" (51-84), "Idioms and popular phrases" (85-89), "Grammar" (listing deviances from St E, 90-104), "Slang" (105-20) and "Pronunciation" (121-6). Finally, there is a list of 160 items shared by IndE and general SAfE. 2.5.4. The inclusive dictionary The first dictionary made explicitly for in South Africa is an adaptation of the Pocket Oxford Dictionary (Branford 1987); it is therefore quite similar to Burchfield's (1986) work for New Zealand (cf. 2.4.5.). The SAfPOD contains some 30,000 headwords of which ca. 90% were taken over from its British parent dictionary, including much of the scientific vocabulary and the lexis of the English literary tradition from Shakespeare to Dickens and beyond. The South African additions are mainly from J. Branford (1978), selected on the basis of their frequency in printed texts, their frequency in speech (based on fieldworkers' judgements), and of their cultural and historical importance. A rough calculation of the provenience of such additions is about half from Afrikaans and Dutch, 18% English (apparently including new coinages and new

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11% Bantu languages, 1% Khoisan and 18% others; some 80% of the additional entries are unmarked (as slang or colloquial). 2.5.5. The usage dictionary The 'usage' dictionary is represented by Beeton & Dorner (1975). "This most unusual and exciting dictionary" (blurb) is an amateurish compilation combining advice on usage problems, spelling, grammar and confusibles (marking alter­ natives as + 'acceptable' or χ 'not acceptable') with a great number of words for local flora and fauna. The items of greater interest for an outsider are those reflecting the staunchly conservative prescriptivism à la Fowler, perhaps an indication of the tenacity with which at least parts of the English-speaking minority defend their linguistic and cultural identity by preserving the close links with Britain? However, the ca. 3,900 entries of the book (a fourth of these relating to non-lexical usage problems) do not cover any field adequately and the information on meaning and use is sadly deficient in many places. 3. Dictionaries of ESL varieties 3.1. Introductory The reduced functions of English in ESL countries and the fact that the norms of correctness are drawn from outside the country (so that speakers of English will as a rule use accepted international dictionaries published in Oxford, London or New York) leave only very limited functions for local dictionaries. These are mainly of three types: a)

b) c)

dictionaries for practical use in the country, often focusing on loanwords from local languages that could cause problems of intelligibility, and a conspicuous proportion of encyclopedic information; scholarly dictionaries (some meant to supplement the OED, and con­ taining historical as well as recent lexis, word histories and etymologies); usage dictionaries for ESL speakers, concentrating on words where guidance is felt to be needed (possibly based on error analysis).

The need for ESL dictionaries will obviously depend on the size of the speech communities (numbers of potential users, nativization of the variety, develop­ ment of local norms as a consequence of acceptability and of stable uses for intranational functions) and on political decisions relating to the future of English in the official and educational domains. Three regions in particular deserve a treatment within this section: South Asia, West Africa and the Caribbean (much of the latter comprising ESD situations).

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3.2. South Asia 3.2.1. Introductory The history of English in what is now India, Pakistan, Β angla Desh, Nepal and Sri Lanka is comparatively long. Anglicization of certain parts of society started in the 18th century, but became effective only in the 19th. In India, the study of English was obviously motivated by local interest, Indians wishing to gain access to Western technological progress, "employing European gentlemen of talent and education to instruct the natives of India in mathematics, natural philosophy, chemistry, anatomy and other useful sciences, which the natives of Europe have carried to a degree of perfection that has raised them above the inhabitants of other parts of the world," and British convenience, the English wanting to create "a class who may be interpreters between us and the millions whom we govern, a class of persons, Indians in blood and colour, but English in taste, in opinion, in morals and in intellect." (R.R. Roy and T.B. Macaulay in Kachru 1982a:355). The fact that the British colonial administration met with very old cultures on the Indian subcontinent made the degree of influence exerted by Indian languages more thorough than in other parts of the Empire. 3.2.2. The glossarist tradition The 19th-century lexicographical tradition of English in India reflected the limited register input and the function of such dictionaries for Europeans (cf. Kachru 1983:165-89). They were meant to translate words of Indian, Persian and Arabic origin likely to occur in an English colonial context (though this did not necessarily make them part of IndE). Apart from word-lists specifically aimed at administrators (mentioned in Kachru 1983:171), two dictionaries almost simultaneously published deserve closer inspection: Whitworth (1885) and Yule & Burnell (1886). Although Whitworth claimed that he "endeavoured [...] to exclude words of minute technical or of very restricted use" (ix), his dictionary is full of items whose status as English is doubtful. A great improvement towards a more modern lexicography was made by Yule and Burnell. Although they were gentlemen lexicographers with amateur linguistic knowledge, their book is the largest collection of Anglo-Indian words (and much besides). Twenty-two earlier glossaries and up to 800 books were unsystematically excerpted and quoted in the ca. 7,400 entries (including proper names). The editors tried to make the glossary both informative and entertaining. For many cultural aspects of late 19th-century India the book remains a very valuable source, especially since the principle of inclusiveness led to many entries that are linguistically 'unneces-

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sary'. The collection will be very useful for a much-needed Dictionary of Indian English on Historical Principles, even though the documentation, the etymol­ ogies and, in some cases the 'Indianness' of items will need thorough checking. The source of most loanwords is Hindi, but there are a considerable number of Portuguese words, too. 3.2.3. The usage dictionary The subtitle of Nihalani et al. (1979) makes it clear that the compilation is not a full dictionary, but rather a collection of some 1,000 words, usages and phrases that differ from BrE, which could give problems to users of English who wish to conform with international norms of English (Part I) and some 2,000 frequent words for which an acceptable local pronunciation is given side by side with RP (Part II). The explicit aim of the book is "to provide aids for keeping Indian English in touch with British and American English, and enabling Indians to recognize peculiarities in their usage." (vii). The didactic purpose is evident in the lexicon, and is also explicitly formulated in the introduction: "All the items have been recorded from the speech or writing of persons likely to influence the English of Indian learners of the language, namely, university lecturers, school teachers, journalists, radio commentators and leaders of opinion in the society" (5). This does not mean that the dictionary is prescriptive (as many usage dictionaries are, and as Beeton & Dorner (2.4.2.) is in particular): "We have been urged [...] to indicate, in the case of every item in the lexicon, whether the Indian usage described is to be considered acceptable or unacceptable. We have resisted this pressure and maintained a descriptive approach [...]" (7), the absence of comprehensive descriptions of English in India not permitting the authors to pontificate. The authors name the following categories included for comment: Lexis (loanwords, neologisms, i.e. new word-formations, meaning, register, colloca­ tions), Grammar (e.g. 'wrong' pluralisation, prepositions, phrasal verbs, modal verbs), Idiom, Style, and Social/Cultural (i.e. usage related to features of Indian life). Although the categories are loosely defined, it is significant that G labels (for Grammar) take up ca. 60%, but L (for Lexis) only ca. 25%. The number of entries that could serve to complement a dictionary of world English would, then, be quite small. 3.2.4. The modern exclusive dictionary Whereas the absence of an inclusive dictionary for use in India (or in South Asia) is to be explained by the lack of a local norm that would make a die-

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tionary based on Indian usage and on Indian needs acceptable, the lack of a dictionary of Indianisms (of the OED type) is to be accounted for by the fact that ENL countries must come first: with the U.S., Canada and Australia covered, and South Africa forthcoming, one should expect South Asia, West Africa and the Caribbean to follow next. As regards South Asia, no exclusive dictionary appears to be planned. Future editions of the OED (1.7.) could make such regional lexis easily available; to date, we have to make do with a quite unsatisfactory word-list of English as used in India (South Asia) (Coulson 1980; Hawkins 1984). For reasons of economy, the main body in Coulson was taken over from the international edition, but a supplement of 1,800 words supplied, which were compiled from the OED, its supplements, Yule & Burnell and Whitworth. The great majority of entries are words from Hindi and Urdu whose status as loanwords might be questioned. English words which have acquired new meanings or been used in new word-formations rarely overlap with those in Nihalani et al. (1979) (3.2.3.). It is a pity that the separate printing of the same items (Hawkins 1984) was not used to expand the bare word-list into a proper dictionary; the fact that all pronunciations are now given in IPA and a few additional entries are included does not really justify the separate publi­ cation. 3.3. West Africa West Africa is the only ESL region outside South Asia/India for whose regional lexis a dictionary has ever been planned.7 However, the latest survey of the project (Banjo & Young 1982) makes clear that the Dictionary of West African English is only in its initial stage (and has been dormant for a few years). The DWAE is intended as an exclusive dictionary recording words, meanings and idioms only found in (and therefore typical of) certain parts or the whole of West Africa. Its restriction to written sources is meant to secure documentation and exclude, by and large, learner's errors. (It is not clear whether this also means that only certain types of printed texts are accepted, but various forms of 'broken' English, such as the language used in some of the Onitsha Market literature, are excluded). The DWAE will combine the problems of delimitation apparent in the Jamaican and the South African dictionaries. For one thing, it is not at all clear whether Pidgin is to be clearly set off from the various Englishes of the region, and in particular, whether the lexicons of Pidgin and English are sufficiently 7

I have been unable to find out whether exploratory moves for a dictionary of Singapore English have led to any results.

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distinct (however great the difference in syntax). Secondly, the Nigerian situation suggests that thousands of words from Hausa, Yoruba and Igbo (not to mention the minor languages) are potential parts of English utterances, possibly italicized in a printed text. Are these English words, and what criteria exist to decide about their inclusion? Difficult as these problems may be, it would be good to have a draft version of the DWAE put out and use it to test regional, social and stylistic restrictions throughout West African countries. 3.4. The Caribbean The inclusion of the Caribbean among ESL regions is problematic. Most countries to be covered by the CDCEU (Allsopp fc.) have a post-creole con­ tinuum (ESD type). However, the forthcoming dictionary will certainly serve Spanish-, French- und Dutch-speaking ESL/EFL communities in the area, too. A dictionary of Caribbean English covering the complete area from Guyana to the Bahamas and from Belize to Barbados has long been an urgent desidera­ tum. Local dictionaries such as Cassidy & Le Page's on Jamaica (4.2.2.) or Holm's on the Bahamas (4.2.3.) include (or rather concentrate on) the creole end of the continuum. They will be indispensable sources for a Caribbean English dictionary, but also very useful complements to it. Allsopp has been preparing the Concise Dictionary of Caribbean English & Usage (CDCEU) as co-ordinator of the Caribbean Lexicography Project (begun in 1971 and housed at UWI, Barbados). The aims and methods were outlined in a number of articles and are here summarized on the basis of Allsopp (1978, 1983). The CDCEU is to include the complete island Caribbean and neighbouring English-(creole-)speaking territories (Belize, Guyana), attempting to define accepted usage of written English in a framework that allows regional (national) decisions in the case of heteronyms. The project is obviously dependent on close co-operation among the states concerned (in particular their school boards and ministries of education). Such diversity is complicated by the fact that CarE is widely considered unprestigious and not entitled to local norms, the outside norms set by British (and recently by American) standards being the better option. Whereas a decision on what is acceptable CarE is likely to be compara­ tively easy in the field of syntax, one would have to envisage a lexical norm in which not just one CarE item from one member state is 'standard', but several words are of equal status, a situation comparable in fact to the co-existence of several lexical sets in standard German (cf. ch. 4). Allsopp (1983) describes the methods of such codification from a lexicographer's point of view, but language planning decisions will have to be implemented by the political powers. They,

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in turn, need publication of the CDCEU in order to have material available on which to base decisions. At any rate, the social and political problems connected with a project such as CDCEU are infinitely greater than with a scholarly dictionary such as the DJE (4.2.2.). 4. Dictionaries of English-related pidgins and creoles 4.1. General lexicographical problems Various factors make it necessary to justify the inclusion of PC languages in this survey (cf. 1.3., and similar decisions taken in Görlach 1984b and in the coverage of the journal English World-Wide): a)

The status of the languages concerned as independent or as varieties of English is problematic. Even if it is admitted that largely decreolized forms functioning as dialects in a post-creole continuum (such as Bahamian English, 4.2.1.) should certainly be included, and others should not, because the structural distance from English and the absence of a continuum separate them as regards forms and functions (e.g. Surinam's PC languages Sranan, Saramaccan and Djuka), there would still be undecided cases such as Jamaican Creole, Krio, Cameroonian, Tok Pisin or Bislama — all used in some sort of diglossic situation with (local or international) English, and with a continuum between the two ends either existing or likely to develop. With the exception of the Surinam lan­ guages, English-related PC languages are therefore included here.

b)

The 'transplantation' did not affect speakers of some form of English but (as was the case with later speakers of Caribbean PC) of unrelated languages (such as West African).

c)

The PC language type, it could be argued, requires separate treatment. However, if PC languages are English-related, it is precisely their lexicons that constitute the link (much as the meaning of individual lexemes is likely to be changed), whereas their syntaxes, phonologies and pragmatics may well be distinctively non-English. Also note that further 'Europeanization' of these languages in the process of decreolization will affect the lexicon first and most thoroughly.

d)

The documentation of these languages will be different from ENL and ESL varieties. While it is conceded that a dictionary of a PC language exclusively based on written sources would be sadly deficient, it is also clear that the proportion of written: spoken material is a general lexico-

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graphical problem which will have to be solved individually according to the individual cultures represented. It is quite a different matter whether it is helpful, or legitimate, to provide PC languages, possibly including those existing only in spoken forms, with orthog­ raphies, grammars and dictionaries, and thereby completely change the 'ecology' of the languages in question. 4.2. The Caribbean 4.2.1. History The Central American region started off as territory allocated to the Spanish by the Papal Edict of 1490. The English were represented by the buccaneers in the 16th century, and as a colonial power from the early 17th, with Barbados becoming British in 1625, Belize in 1638, Jamaica in 1665 and the Bahamas in 1670 (cf. Holm 1994). The presence of Spanish, French, English, Dutch and Danish colonizers and their languages (and often also various pidgin/creole varieties of these) and frequent changes in the ownership of individual colonial territories have resulted in the complex coexistence of a great number of languages and dialects, de-creolizing or re-creolizing, receding or expanding, as the case may be. Apart from Surinam and parts of the Central American coast (plus small communities elsewhere), where English-related creoles are now in a diglossie situation with Dutch and Spanish respectively, they form continua with the local forms of St E. There are extreme forms which make the interintelligibility of the basilectal and acrolectal ends difficult or impossible, but as a rule linguistic divergency within individual territories has decreased in the 20th century. The existence of a continuum makes it impossible for a lexicographer to describe creole and local English lexis separately. Whether resulting local collections should then be called dictionaries of X-ean English or X-ean Creole is a matter of personal preference (the Jamaican and Bahamian works use 'English' in their titles, 4.2.2. & 3.). Although dictionaries of some creole varieties are reported to be in progress (most important, Lise Winer's of Trinidadian, cf. Winer 1983), and some wordlists exist in the form of popular books (Collymore 1970 on Barbadian), an unprinted thesis (Holm 1978 on Miskito Coast Creole) or a basic word-list for Peace Corps workers (Dayley 1979 on Belizean Creole), only two full diction­ aries are in print, and will be discussed below:

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4.2.2. Jamaica Serious lexicographical work was started in Jamaica with R. Le Page's Linguistic Survey of the West Indies in 1953; B.L. Bailey and D. DeCamp did important fieldwork for the dialect geography of Jamaica in the late 1950s. It was of great importance for Jamaica (and for the creole languages in general) to have a full historical dictionary of Jamaican published as a result of 14 years' work (Cassidy & Le Page 1967). The collection of data was based mainly on written sources, but various institutions and individuals helped to complement these with spoken material. Le Page, who was the chief editor from the beginning in 1955, decided to produce a complement to the OED, DAE, and DA, documenting the full range of Jamaican speech from 'dialect' to the standard language of the educated. 'Jamaicanisms' drawn from these sources and included in the DJE fall into seven categories: (1) Words or senses now (or once) general in English but of which the earliest or latest record is in a book about Jamaica by one who had been there or otherwise had direct knowledge of the island. Examples: ANATTA, BANJO. (2) Words not otherwise especially associated with Jamaica, but recorded earlier or later, in a book about Jamaica, than they are known to be recorded elsewhere. Examples: ALBINO, GRAPEFRUIT. (3) Words, spellings, or senses used in Jamaica though not a part of the English language outside the Caribbean. (When these are known to be used elsewhere in the Caribbean, this fact is noted.) Examples: BARRACOOTA, OBEAH. (4) Dialect words which have been given written forms more or less in the manner of traditional orthography. Examples: BIGE, JUNJO. (5) Dialect words written down by their collectors in naive spellings, whose spoken form is unknown. Examples: LASITA, BALEH. (6) Dialect forms known only from oral sources. Examples: nombari, talawa. (7) Dialect forms which, though sometimes printed in dialect literature, have no established spelling and are known chiefly from oral sources. Examples: singkuma, pere-pere. It may be noted that the first five types are entered in capitals, the latter two in lower-case letters, (xii).

Although DAE/DA are named as models, the difference between them and DJE is considerable; this is mainly a consequence of the inclusion of 'dialect' which was deliberately left out in the American dictionaries. The DJE is, with some 10,900 entries, a large dictionary. Its scholarly character is obvious from the care with which variant spellings and pronuncia­ tions are recorded, its differentiated use of restrictive labels, etymologies and the full documentation at the end of entries. Obviously, Jamaica is seen as the centre

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of the Anglophone Caribbean: the editors rightly assume that subsequent diction­ aries of Caribbean Creole varieties will be complementary to DJE as DJE was to DΑΕ/DA. It is a pity that the obvious idea to include information on the regional distribution of items within the Caribbean area outside Jamaica is as patchy as it apparently is. It has to be conceded that such a comparative exercise (which would also have to take into account creole items found elsewhere in the Caribbean but absent from Jamaican) will have to wait until the most important varieties are available for lexicological analysis. 4.2.3. The Bahamas It was fortunate that the first complement to DJE (Holm 1982) came from a peripheral Caribbean region, since this allows one to draw interesting con­ clusions from the overlapping and the divergent portions of the two vocabularies — and that the new dictionary was so excellently done. The 5,500 entries were based on Shilling's thesis, Holm's reading of early printed sources, and intensive fieldwork on the major Bahamian islands. The compilers took full account of the sociocultural history as reflected in presentday regional and social variation, in particular the contribution that the Loyalists' slaves, brought to the islands in the late 18th century, are likely to have made. For a word to be included, it had to add information not found in other dictionaries (such as DAE/DA/DJE). In fact, the editors with only a slight modification accepted the DJE guidelines for their definition of what constituted a Bahamianism. As in DJE, the scholarly exhaustiveness of the information on spellings, pronunciations, meanings and etymology is praiseworthy. In addition, their fieldwork permitted the editors to provide a very precise indication of regional and social currency/acceptability, a pattern well worth applying for a future pan-Caribbean creole dictionary. Since much of the most distinctive lexis clusters around traditional customs and beliefs, it is especially helpful to have 'topical' entries on such anthro­ pological fields, with references to the various lexical entries in the dictionary — a feature that also adds to the readability of the book and is certainly worthy of imitation. 4.3. West Africa 4.3.1. History The complex history of West Africa is in various ways reflected in present-day linguistic evidence, in particular the impact that European colonial powers had on the region: as merchants and missionaries, slave traders and colonial adminis-

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trators. One characteristic is the early existence of a coastal pidgin (or broken) English, as testified, for example, in the diary of the Calabar chief Antera Duke in the late 18th century. Modern varieties of pidgins and of English formed, on the basis of the pre-existing lingua franca, in the 19th century, when blacks from the U.S. and Jamaica were resettled in Sierra Leone where they built, together with local Africans and recaptives from slave ships, the Krio society of Free­ town; when liberated U.S. slaves went to Liberia in 1821 taking with them American traditions and an early form of U.S. Black English; when Southern Nigeria and Cameroon were christianized by European and also Krio-speaking missionaries. With a tightening of colonial administration and expansion of education, English spread, partly reducing the functions of the earlier pidgin, partly merging with it to form various forms of 'broken' English. Whereas today little pidgin is recorded from Ghana, and English in Liberia continues to be oriented towards America, the pidgins in Sierra Leone (Freetown), and, less so, in Southern Nigeria and West Cameroon have creolized and appear to be at least stable as far as numbers of speakers are concerned. 4.3.2. Krio Krio has been in use for several centuries; it is now the mother tongue of more than 100,000 speakers in and around Freetown and is used by up to a million Sierra Leoneans as a lingua franca. However, its uses as a written language have been very limited, and its prestige has remained low. It is therefore a landmark for Krio to have available a first full-scale scholarly dictionary (Fyle & Jones 1980). The book includes a core grammar, very useful to have since it explains the part-of-speech classifications used in the entries, and a surprisingly large vocabulary of 30,000 items. This is a consequence of the editors' decision to regard "every word that is used in Krio speech as a Krio word", which makes widespread codeswitching between Krio and English a limitless source of 'imports' of technical vocabulary, the phonological adaptation of such words apparently considered sufficient to accept them as part of Krio. There is also a great wealth of phrases, idioms and proverbial sayings, all listed separately, and not all strictly necessary since in many cases it is easy to deduce the meaning of the phrases from the components. The 'Englishness' of much of the lexis is disguised by the consistent use of a phonemic spelling (cf. the Pacific pidgins in 4.4.); also tones are indicated throughout. A typical entry, then, has the lemma followed by tone pattern, etymology, part of speech label, meaning (with specimen sentences, and where applicable, encyclopedic information). The KED is a scholarly book; it is to be regretted that the publishers gave up the idea of

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producing a 'concise' edition for use in the country which would also have meant better feedback. (The price of the dictionary makes it unlikely that there will be many copies available for use in the country.) Therefore, it is difficult to predict whether the book will have much influence on the spelling and the 'fixing' of the vocabulary of Krio (and possibly on other West African pidgins). 4.3.3. Nigerian and Cameroonian Pidgin Whatever the claim of common interintelligibility of all English-related pidgins along the West African coast (tentatively named Weskos by earlier writers), it is evident that NigPE and CamPE are very similar and probably best treated as dialects of a common language (no systematic comparisons have been made). The limited state of knowledge is reflected in the lexicography: two earlier draft dictionaries (Schneider 1960; Rotimi 1977) exist in mimeographed form only; plans to publish an expanded form of Rotimi's work have apparently been cancelled. 4.4. The Southwest Pacific 4.4.1. Introductory The SW Pacific is especially significant for the study of English-related pidgins and creoles for a number of reasons. The plantation origins of the respective varieties in Samoa, Fiji, New Caledonia and Queensland are comparatively recent (1850-1905) so that the full life-cycle of pidgins was until recently fully recoverable. The late 19th century is also historically well documented so that language development can be closely correlated with political conditions. On the other hand, Tok Pisin and Bislama have received, in the course of the last twenty years, a higher status and prestige and have been used in many more domains than the older pidgins and creoles in the Caribbean and in West Africa. Although these facts are not fully reflected in lexicographical research and published dictionaries so far (cf. Görlach 1984c), the apparent need for such reference books leads one to expect that they will be provided soon. 4.4.2. Tok Pisin of Papua New Guinea The early lexicographical work was almost exclusively confined to missionaries in the North (Pidgin was actively discouraged in Papua, under the Australian administration up to 1975). The wordlists produced by missionaries were, however, inadequate; most remain in manuscript.

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The first dictionary of wider circulation is Mihalic (1957, 1971). The two prefaces of 1957 and 1971 illustrate the dramatic changes in attitude that happened in these 14 years: whereas Tok Pisin was thought to be better replaced by 'proper' English (and the provisional character of the dictionary excused by its short-term usefulness) in 1957, the language had firmly entrenched itself by 1971 Unfortunately the linguistic basis for the book has remained shaky, which is especially problematic since the dictionary has a kind of monopoly in the country and has probably affected the usage of many learners, at least in standardizing the spelling in written documents. The definitive edition of 1971 (now out of print and likely to be replaced by a revised and expanded version) has a core grammar (1-49) followed by a "Dictionary of Melanesian Pidgin [as it is still called] to English", with some 1,500 entries (plus a wealth of phrases, idioms and specimen sentences) and more than 4,000 entries in the "English to Melanesian Pidgin" section. Finally, part of the Pidgin lexis is organized in 23 "Practical Word Groups". Throughout dictionary definitions are rudimentary and usage labels missing; thus it can only serve for a few of the functions which a user would expect normally of a dictionary. 4.4.3. Bislama (Vanuatu) Bislama (formerly Beach-la-Mar) has come to serve as one of the three official languages in Vanuatu (the Condominium of the New Hebrides before Indepen­ dence in 1980); it is said to be the only state on earth to have its constitution also in pidgin. Other uses of the language have dramatically increased over the past few years, too, but standardization appears to be only emergent: it is not clear whether uses by the administration, by the media (radio, newspapers), or by the churches (the New Testament, preaching) will be most effective in the process. The two existing dictionaries admittedly cover only part of the stylistic and geographical variation: Camden (1977) is based on the compiler's experience in translating the New Testament into Bislama, apparently supplemented by lexis from various other domains. About half of the 3,000 items in the list consist of entries in which lemma and gloss are identical except for the spelling (type TIPOT: n. a teapot), but others can have a wealth of illustrative phrases, idioms and specimen sentences added. The status of a great number of words as part of Bislama is uncertain: Camden has 'enriched' the list by English words spelt the Bislama way especially from the religious domain (type APOSTOLIK, ASEMBLIS OF GOD).

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Guy (1974) based his collection and description on Bislama as spoken in the north of the country. He provides an elementary grammar in both English and French, then a dictionary of 1,300 items glossed in English and French, followed by two lists with English and with French headwords, apparently mechanically reversed from the master (Bislama-first) list. The small number of entries is explained by Guy's puristic exclusion of anglicized vocabulary (which makes it impossible to use with newspapers or the Bible). Also, a linguistically sound but impracticable idiosyncratic orthography limits the practical worth of the book. Lexical definitions are minimal; most consist of one equivalent in English and in French, the English item often being the source of the Bislama word (type PES: page — page). Crowley (1990) covered new ground in many respects. His book is in three parts, He starts with a core grammar of Bislama, with a helpful discussion of parts of speech (1-37). The second part with ca. 4,000 Bislama headwords (comprising some "7500 pieces of lexical informa­ tion", 4) on pp. 39-262 is followed by an English-Bislama section (263-456) which includes "equivalents of 6250 English words" (10). Although this uses the same material as the second section, it is not a mechanical reversal. Also, Crowley lists words from various regions, sociolects and styles — accepting as Bislama many items which differ from their English etymon only in spelling or pronunciation, which brings the total of his entries far beyond a number expected for a PC language (cf. the practice for the Krio dictionary). Reliable and clear definitions make the dictionary useful for both native speakers and foreign learners. 4.4.4. Solomon Pijin (Solomon Islands) Only one insufficient list has been published to date (Simons & Young 1980). The major part of this book consists of word lists: Pijin to English (25-121, some 1,300 entries), English to Pijin (122-55). The headwords are normally glossed only by one word, most often the source word of the Pijin item. The genesis of the project indicates that the dictionary is far from exhaustive; no judgement is possible on the frequency, acceptability of stylistic distribution or exact semantic content of the words listed. 4.4.5. Kriol (Northern Territory, Australia) and Torres Strait Broken The pidgin tradition of Aboriginal Australian speakers dates back to the first English-speaking settlers of Botany Bay, but was reinforced when the Queens­ land plantation system came into existence in the late 19th century and when connections with the other SW Pacific pidgins were established. Contrary to

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163

Cape York Creole, the Aboriginal communities in the Northern Territories and Kimberleys appear to have had few contacts with what became Tok Pisin and Bislama. Their pidgin creolized around 1910; its 15,000 speakers are spread over most of Northern Australia, but concentrate in Ngukurr-Bamyili (Roper River). Sandefur & Sandefur (1979) is the first dictionary of the variety, based on an earlier word-list by M. Sharper and on the great amount of creative writing that has come from the community in the past few years. The dictionary comprises some 2,750 entries (a surprising figure for a creole), but provides only minimal glosses. A fuller dictionary containing variants, full definitions, style markers etc. is very much desirable. The creole spoken by some 4.000 native speakers on the Torres Strait islands has found comprehensive treatment in Shnukal (1988). The author provides a detailed grammatical description followed by a dictionary of some 3.500 creole items, supplemented by a kind of thesaurus and a reverse word list English into Broken. Apart from the scholarly value of this pioneering work, it might also contribute to standardizing the variety and helping speakers of Broken with their acquisition of St E. 5. Postscript Remarkably little has happened, as far as dictionaries of New Englishes and related varieties are concerned, in the time since my survey appeared five years ago. We are still waiting for the Dictionary of South African English on Historical Principles (the first volume has now been announced, Silva fc), Orsman's Dictionary of New Zealand English and Allsopp's Concise Dictionary of Caribbean English & Usage. There are a few new books, but they are on more marginal varieties — which need not restrict their typological importance (Crowley 1990, Mesthrie 1992, Tabbert 1991). In 1995, it still remains unclear what possibilities computer-assisted lexicography will provide for research in the field in general, and to English as a world language in particular.

IRISH ENGLISH AND IRISH CULTURE IN DICTIONARIES OF ENGLISH1

1. Introduction 1.1. There have been many and quite vociferous complaints about the neglect of non-London lexis in English dictionaries (cf. Aitken 1987), but the fact that Ireland fares much worse than, say, Scotland or America has been largely overlooked. My paper summarizes the lexicography of IrE and the contributions that Ireland has made to IntE, contrasting the evidence with that from Scotland. I will also try to explain why there has never been a proper dictionary of the variety, and investigate the inclusion of Irish items in various dictionaries published in Oxford, London, Edinburgh, New York and Sydney. How many terms relating to the culture and English dialect of Ireland are included and for what reasons? To what extent would such a dictionary facilitate the reading of a typical Irish text (say, Synge's Playboy, or James Joyce's works, or a modern Irish newspaper)? Is there a need for an exclusive or inclusive dictionary of IrE? The western world owes a great debt to Ireland, and yet the country and its culture have long been marginal for Britain, and for Europe in general. That this has not always been so, and need not be so in the future, is shown by the immense influence that Irish thinking had on England and Scotland in the 6th century, when much of the Christianization of these parts was achieved by Irish monks, and in the 7th century, when the Irish missionaries extended their activity to Germany, where Schottenklöster still testify to the foundations of Christianity and learning laid by Irishmen. However, later centuries — after the invasion of Norsemen and later on of the Normans had destroyed much of the political and cultural structure of the country — saw Ireland either isolated or reacting to outside pressures. Surprisingly, the Irish gave little, linguistically speaking, at the time when they were culturally dominant, and even less when they came to be suppressed. The paper was delivered as a guest lecture at various universities and at the Anglistentag at Graz 1994; a shorter version will appear in the Proceedings (ed. W. Riehle, Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1995).

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Close contact with the English-speaking world from the 17th century onwards meant, for the Irish, defeat or, at best, defence and defiance. In consequence, Irish culture, whether in its Gaelic or its IrE form, contributed little to BrE or to IntE as far as the lexicon is concerned. This is the case despite the long list of illustrious writers that came from Ireland, whether of Gaelic or Anglo-Irish background, and the enormous contribution they made to English literature. The story might have been quite different, or so one might have thought2 — Farquhar, Congreve, Swift, Steele, Burke, Sterne, Goldsmith and Sheridan in the 18th century, later on Moore, Shaw, Wilde, Joyce and Beckett were among the most important writers of their times. In addition there is the more regional tradition, represented by Maria Edgeworth, Lady Morgan, the brothers Banim (whose O'Hara Tales of 1825 were intended to achieve for Ireland what Scott had done for Scotland3), Griffin, Carleton, Lever and Ross & Somerville, and the writers of the Irish Renaissance, most notably Lady Gregory, Synge and Yeats. Yet all this remarkable literary output had little impact on the English language. P.W. Joyce, too, was mistaken about Irish influence when he wrote in 1910 (though discussing an entirely different kind of writing): The adoption of Irish words and phrases into English nowadays is in great measure due to the influence of Irishmen resident in England, who write a large proportion — indeed I think the largest proportion — of the articles in English periodicals of every kind. (1910:4)

This relative failure to make an impact on the English lexicon is paralleled by the few traces that the large numbers of Irish emigrants have left on the speech of Manchester, Liverpool or London, or on the dialects of Canada, the United States, the Caribbean or Australia where they frequently formed the majority of the local population, particularly in 19th-century settlements.4 2

Compare the rank of German writers coming from the fringe — like the Swiss writers Meyer and Keller, or Frisch and Dürrenmatt, and the Prague writers Kafka, Brod and Werfel — and their relatively minor contribution to the vocabulary of 20th-century German. For a succinct survey of Anglo-Irish literature, which includes due consideration of the extent to which Ireland was the topic of the individual writer's work, compare Hogan (1980), from which much of my argument is summarized. 3

The imitation is almost slavish in John Banim's The Boyne Water (1826), where some characters speak a kind of Scots obviously straight from Scott. Note that Scott had stated in the postscript to Waverley that he was attempting to do for Scotland what Edgeworth had done for Ireland(!); cf. ch. 8. 4

Individual exceptions like bonnyclabber (which is, or was, common in parts of the USA, but is unknown in England) or AusE larrikin (which is thought to be derived from Irish) or

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Yet very distinctive English dialects were spoken in Ireland; but again, research has neglected the matter. Apart from the historical interest in the dying Yola dialect of Wexford and the Pale, 19th-century linguists did not think Irish varieties of English worth intensive study. They were often considered garbled, funny and indicative of poverty and lower-class status. Even Wright's dialect dictionary and grammar (1898-1905) failed to include a comprehensive study of IrE dialects. Moreover, in the 20th century much of the interest of linguists was taken up by the dying Gaelic dialects. The English of Ireland still has no comprehensive published dialect survey (cf. Henry 1958, 1985), no atlas, national dictionary nor a grammar documenting the regional distribution of its distinctive features — nor has a full sociolinguistic urban study been con­ ducted.5 The problem is further complicated by the fact that Ν IrE, with its con­ siderable input of Ulster Scots, has a remarkably different lexicon. However, the degree of overlap between the two major regional varieties has never been empirically examined.6 1.2. Terminology It will be useful at this point to consider two terminological problems. Firstly, we ought to distinguish between two classes of words: there are the technical terms relating to Irish objects and customs, for which there may be no equiva­ lents in England or America. The borrowing of the Irish word is here the easiest and most precise way of designating the object, such as cloghaun or curragh (these are commonly called 'foreignisms'; note that sometimes periphrasis is also used, as in carrageen = Irish moss', cf., for Australia, koala = native bear).

isolated features of pronunciation surviving in parts of the Ottawa Valley, the Appalachians etc. do not disprove the point. There are more substantial remains of IrE in Newfoundland, owing to the isolation of the communities; a check of the Dictionary of Newfoundland English (Story et al. 1982) yielded a surprisingly high number of inclusions (most of these obsolescent or obsolete): cf. the entries for bawn, boneen/bonnire, bostoon, crubeen, dudeen, glaum, gombeen etc. and other words of Irish derivation like brackety, bresna, buckaloon, dadyeens, gawmoge, glab, glavaun, gommel etc. For Montserrat cf. ch. 1, note 10. 5

Recent research by scholars like Barry, Filppula, Harris, Kallen and the Milroys has con­ centrated on phonology and syntax, and rightly so: in natural speech and in written/literary representation deviance and internal variation on these levels is much more salient than on the level of vocabulary (cf. Kallen 1994). 6

C. Macafee, editor of the forthcoming Concise Ulster Dictionary, sees the problem of distin­ guishing Ν from S IrE: "While a core Ulster Scots could be separated off, the Scots influence is also pervasive in Ν HibE, which in turn shades into S HibE" (p.c.).

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By contrast, proper 'Irishisms' are expressions for which speakers of BrE or AmE would use a heteronym (IrE colleen as against NE Scots quine, Ν BrE lass, W BrE wench or maiden etc.; cf. ch. 4). The distinction is important for lexicographical practice not just because of the different labels to be used (in Ireland vs. IrE), but also because lexicog­ raphers hesitant to include technical words will curb the number of the first group, whereas those reluctant to accept dialect and slang terms will reduce the second. Note that items of either group can lose their Irishness and become international (hedge school as against galore, smithereens). Secondly, the variety of which the words under consideration form a dis­ tinctive part is variously called Anglo-Irish, Irish English or Hiberno-English (apart from terms like Irish dialect, Irish, Irish brogue, etc. which are either ambiguous, derogatory, or both). Todd has the following to say on the term 'Anglo-Irish' (in Todd & Hancock 1986:45), summarizing the five different meanings one is likely to encounter: 1 the English gentry who were granted lands in Ireland in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth century 2 the type of English used by these people, often virtually identical in the written medium to the educated variety in England, but marked in the spoken medium by the retention of certain features of pronunciation that changed in England. The most obvious retention was the /e/ sound in words like 'receive' and 'tea'. The name of the Anglo-Irish poet Yeats rhymes with 'hates' whereas the name of the English poet Keats rhymes with 'heats'. 3 the literature written by people who were born in Ireland but were of English origin. Among such writers were Oscar Wilde and George Bernard Shaw. 4 the literature of people born in Ireland who were not of English origin but who used English as a literary medium. Among these are Sean O'Casey, James Joyce and Seamus Heaney. 5 the English used by Irish people whose ancestral mother tongue was Gaelic.

Elsewhere (under Irish English) she suggests that we regard IrE as the cover term, which would then comprise HibE as the indigenous variety (divided into Southern and Northern), and Ulster Scots and Anglo-Irish as the two major imported varieties (here combined as BrE). Whether we wish to accept her classification or not,7 it should be realized that the words in my lists come from various parts of IrE with the exception of items restricted to Ulster Scots. 7

I have not included the three terms in my first checklist tested on informants, since it is more important how they are defined in the individual dictionaries than whether they are in. Classi­ fication is important, however, when it comes to labelling the words in my list.

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An individual feature of the variety (not necessarily lexical), and given the 'colonial' stigma attached to all things Irish, most often applied in censorious tones, is a Hibernicism or an Irishism (less frequently, a Paddyism). Unfortun­ ately, the OED quotations for these terms give so little context that the full derogatory power of the words cannot be fully discerned. We do not seem to have a full sociolinguistic discussion of the terms anywhere in the literature, in contrast to what we have for both Scotticism and Americanism in Witherspoon's comment in "The Druid" no. V (reprinted in Mathews 1931:14-20).8 1.3. Scottish and Irish English contrasts The linguistic history of IrE, and its scholarly documentation, is conspicuously different from that of Scots and ScE. There are a number of interrelated reasons for this: 1)

Scots was a full language, with a remarkably wide range of written texts, in the 16th century: some domains like law, education and the Kirk have remained relatively independent of England even since 1603 and 1707 and some of the lexis survived in the written regional standard of ScE. (Note that the story is quite similar for both Scots/ScE and IrE where Celtic loanwords from Scottish and Irish Gaelic are concerned — but for Ireland this Celtic source served as the major input into the specific lexicon whereas Scots had this function for Scotland (Scots even acted as the mediator for quite a few Celtic words, as in the case of ingle or kebbuck).

2)

Scottish writers have available an unbroken tradition of literary uses of the auld leid (both Scots and ScE) in various genres; they were able to draw upon a distinctive lexis of tens of thousands of words.9

3)

Scottish writers like Burns and Scott were widely read, and in spite of all their lexical difficulties, understood and imitated in England (and Ireland). This means that Burns and Scott contributed more words to St E than any other contemporary writer — Scots words in English dictionaries are still

8

There are various references to IrE in Grose's contemporary Classical Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue (1785), but they do not add up to a coherent sociolinguistic statement.

9

There is incidental evidence of such differences between Scottish and Irish varieties in texts like those in Grimm (1982), in which McKay's translations into Scots are accompanied by an extensive glossary (which includes even words like bairn, daft, loon and lug), whereas no glosses are provided for Schofield's translations into IrE (which are characterized mainly by phonological and syntactic deviances from St E).

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to a large extent 'Burnsian' or drawn from Scott's Scottish novels. By contrast, only a small proportion of Maria Edgeworth's work is available in print, and the regional novelists of the 19th century (like the Banims) are more or less unknown, at least outside English departments in Ireland.10 4)

The prestige of Scots remained strong among the educated. Some of them thought it a privilege to document the language by re-editing older poets and writing glossaries for these works. Jamieson's Etymological Dic­ tionary of the Scottish Language of 1808 was an achievement that can stand beside Dr. Johnson's dictionary. Ever since, there has been an unbroken tradition of Scottish lexicographers, as the names of Warrack, Murray, Grant, Craigie, Murison and Aitken testify.

Ireland has nothing comparable, and it is therefore no surprise that if Scotland has fared badly in English dictionaries, Ireland has fared much worse. Aitken (1987) has complained about the relative neglect of Scottish lexis in common dictionaries, and it may be useful to compare his data with the Irish ones.11 For his survey, Aitken assembled "an admittedly arbitrary selection of items of Scottish usage that [...] a major general dictionary of English might want to include" (1987:101). His 324 items are classified as follows: 1) Covert Scotticisms (24; unmarked: pinkie) 2) Covert Scottish use (32; different meanings/applications: the messages) 3) Names for inhabitants (10; Aberdonian) 4) Overt Scotticisms (45; intended for stylistic effect: ken, outwith) 5) Common idioms (22; almost all overt: to set the heather afire) 6-9) Cultural Scotticisms (legal: 50; the Kirk: 15; education: 15; general culture: 52) 10) Stereotypes or vulgarisms (4; 'stage Scots': crivvens)

10

The reprint of 77 major 19th-century novels (ed. Woolf, New York: Garland, 1978-79) has not drastically changed the picture since the price of the set means that the works are not accessible in most university libraries; the reprint will certainly not have any more wideranging linguistic influence. 11 Similar in intention to Aitken's is Pollner's (1994) analysis of how many of the 100+ Scotticisms assembled in Hume's famous list of 1764 were included in dictionaries between Cawdrey's of 1604 and Walker's of 1791 — as with Aitken's test words, Hume's are regional standard rather than dialectal, and the 'neglect' of Scottish lexis is, unsurprisingly, even more obvious in EModE dictionaries than in modern ones.

170

11)

6 Irish English and Irish culture in dictionaries of English

Burnsisms (55; from a Bums glossary, and handed on in Scots poetry: aiblins)

Aitken found that Collins and Webster's Third included roughly two thirds of the words tested, but the Concise Oxford, Chambers and Longman roughly one third only — the most surprising feature is the limited coverage of Scottish items in the Edinburgh-based Chambers dictionary.12 It might seem sensible to apply Aitken's categories to Ireland and conduct a comparison, type by type. However, both objective and subjective reasons make this difficult: a) b)

As explained above, some categories have no equivalent in Ireland, most notably, 'Burnsisms' are absent; my limited competence in IrE makes it impossible to distinguish with any degree of accuracy between overt and covert Irishisms (assuming that these categories make sense) and to detect and evaluate idioms.13

To summarize: overall, the number of Irishisms in general dictionaries is likely to be much smaller than that of Scotticisms, because: a)

b)

the formal registers have retained a great deal of Scots in law, education etc.; Ireland, by contrast, failed to achieve the degree of independence in former centuries that would have allowed the development and retention of an independent lexis in these domains; the informal registers were traditionally reserved to Scots from where they passed into ScE quite easily, forming part of the colloquial regional layer (Macleod 1993 sees this section as a particular stronghold of local speech). By contrast, this register would have been, in much of 19thcentury Ireland, derived from Gaelic, and accordingly felt to be a charac­ teristic of lower-class or rural IrE, easily lost in the aftermath of the language shift;14 stereotypes of garbled English in Irish mouths would

12

More recent editions of the dictionaries checked by Aitken are likely to change these figures to a certain extent; in particular, Collins is likely to be more comprehensive in its recent third edition (1991). l3 See "A variety of phrases" collected in Joyce (1910:185-208); these range from idioms to proverbs, and from aphorisms to riddles — few of these would be recorded in any type of dictionary, even if their currency were less doubtful. 14 Bliss (1984:141) states: "The number of actual Irish words used in southern Hiberno-English is small, even in rural areas; educated people do not use them at all, except by way of con­ scious rusticism." It is likely that his statement goes too far and will have to be modified —

6

c)

Irish English and Irish culture in dictionaries of English

171

not have a chance of being accepted in IntE, either.15 the Scottish literary tradition has kept alive a great amount of poetic diction ('Burnsisms' and similar items); the comparable effort on the Irish side is quite recent, was never lexically very rich, and did not form a stable tradition of poetic diction.16

In summary: Aitken might easily have doubled the number of words he inves­ tigated, but it is quite difficult to compile for IrE a list of words half as long that have a reasonable claim to be entered in general dictionaries. Moreover, the currency of the selected items is uncertain. Since I depend on unreliable word-lists of IrE and cannot trust general dictionaries without being caught in a vicious circle, I will have to complement my investigation by testing native-speaking audiences or asking the help of colleagues.17

but we need empirical evidence for this correction. Barry (1982:110) points out that some of the IrE words that are derived from Gaelic were reborrowed into Irish, which also (quite expectedly) has many more loans from English than IrE has from Irish — a natural conse­ quence of the dominance and high prestige of the colonizers' language. 15

For a painstakingly thorough analysis of the 'humorous' tradition of IrE see Earls (1988); stereotypes were of course connected with (mis-)pronunciation, the brogue, and de-railed logic, the bull, rather than with lexis. Earls quotes Swift's relevant statement of 1728: The Irish brogue is no sooner discovered than it makes the deliverer to the last degree ridiculous and despised, and from such a mouth an Englishman expects nothing but bulls, blunders and follies. More than a hundred years later, attitudes had not changed as is evident from W. Carleton's characterization of 'humorous' stage Irish in his Traits and Stories of the Irish Peasantry: [...] the character of an Irishman has been hitherto uniformly associated with the idea of something unusually ridiculous, and scarcely anything in the shape of language was supposed to proceed from his lips, but an absurd congeries of brogue and blunder. 16 Garvin (1977:103) states that the generation of writers following on Yeats and Synge "seem to have discounted the value of the idiom. They used it, but only perfunctorily, and they did little to develop it artistically. They may, perhaps, have thought that it had outlived its artistic validity." 17

Hansen (1990:59) quotes kittogue, shoneen, sleeveen (probably from Joyce 1910) as charac­ teristic of IrE, amongst well-known items like banshee and colleen. No dictionary of my sample includes kittogue; shoneen and sleeveen were added only in two recent editions of two dictionaries. Their present-day currency is not in doubt: the words were accepted by all native speakers I asked.

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2. Dictionaries of IrE Among collections of IrE lexis the following stand out as of relative impor­ tance:18 2.1. Joseph Wright's English Dialect Dictionary is not of course a dictionary of IrE, but it was the editor's explicit purpose to collect "all English dialect words which are still in use or are known to have been in use at any time during the last two hundred years in England, Ireland, Scotland, and Wales" (1898:v). Coverage of Ireland was, however, limited. Wright had only five "correspon­ dents" for the entire island; Joyce's list was the only one mentioned for Ireland under "unprinted collections".19 No printed glossary for IrE was available to him except for Wexford and parts of Ulster, most notably D. Patterson's for Greater Belfast and W.H. Patterson's for Antrim and Down. The value of the evidence included would have to be tested in a full dictionary of IrE. This work is likely to be important in two ways: a) b)

it will allow us to see which of the alleged Irishisms are attested elsewhere in Britain, and it will fill gaps left by other dictionaries, supplying information on 19thcentury IrE dialects that is no longer available. Note that among the words unattested in the dictionaries here checked, Wright alone has an entry for scribe 'narrow strip of arable land' (recorded for Nhb., Nhp., War., Brks., and therefore a dialect word, but not an Irishism) and he complements Joyce's information for banbh 'piglet' (under bonham, N.I. and bonuv Irel.).

18

I pass over Jacob Poole, A Glossary [...] of the Old Dialect of [...] Forth and Bargy of 1867, which is exclusively on the outgoing vocabulary of the medieval English settlement; the word-list in P.L. Henry, An Anglo-Irish Dialect of North Roscommon (Dublin 1957:21336); the lists of local words mostly of Irish agricultural provenance in Ó Maoláin (1979) and the glossaries appended to text collections (such as Bliss 1979:350-76) and the short mono­ graph by Hay den & Hartog (1909) is not accessible to me. The most important works here excluded are Traynor (1953, because of the restriction to Donegal) and Van Rijckeghem (1986, because it is not commonly accessible). Note that there was not even an extract of all the IrE words recorded in Wright (1898-1905), as it was done for Scots by A. Warrack in 1911. (An unpublished MS by John Byers includes EDD material for N.I. but is itself not a dictionary; cf. Macafee 1994.) 19

Joyce states in his Preface (1910:ix): "A number of the Irish items [...] were contributed by me and are generally printed with my initials. I have neither copied nor avoided these [...]."

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2.2. P.W. Joyce's20 English as we Speak it in Ireland of 1910 is the singlehanded effort of a man born of a poor farmer's family in Limerick, who grew up bilingually, receiving his education in hedge-schools to become a teacher at the age of nineteen. He was finally elected a member of the Royal Irish Academy in 1863. His major book on IrE is the devoted but quite unsystematic account of the linguistic peculiarities of bis country, which he had seen changing dramatically during his life-time. As he states in his Preface (1910:v-ix) he used the following types of sources: 1) 2) 3) 4) 5)

his own memory, "a storehouse both of idiom and vocabulary"; returns to a request for dialect words "inserted in nearly all the Irish newspapers"; "the works of Irish writers of novels, stories and essays depicting Irish peasant life in which the people are made to speak in dialect"; "printed articles and pamphlets on [...] Anglo-Irish Dialect"; personal observations entered into a note-book over twenty years.

Dolan is rightly critical of Joyce's methods; he refers to "the constant anecdotalism arising from his extraordinarily associative mind" (1979: viii). Neverthe­ less, the book remains one of the major sources of the variety. In his "Vocabulary and index" (209-352) Joyce lists some 1,300 items; entries range from one line to more than a page. They can include meaning, etymology, regional currency, specimen sentences to illustrate usage, and a great number of anecdotes and trivia as well as cultural information. Most of this material was apparently collected by Joyce himself, but it is difficult to be certain, since he rarely provides sources. Moreover, style markers are missing throughout, and regional restrictions are not fully or consistently indicated. Joyce includes a number of dialect words which are and were cer­ tainly not confined to Ireland, whether these are English (beastings, byre) or Scottish (braw). The largest number of his entries, however, consists of Gaelic words borrowed into local forms of English. Almost all of these forms appear to have been lost meanwhile — and therefore fail to qualify for inclusion in a list of words that might be expected in international dictionaries.

20

The life-data are summarized from Dolan's "Introduction" (in Joyce 1910/1979:vi-viii). For contents, cf. my review of Joyce in EWW 1 (1980), 291 and Todd in EWW 12 (1991), 155-7.

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2.3. J.M. Clark's The Vocabulary of Anglo-Irish (1917)21 is slightly more systematic than Joyce's compilation but also more restricted. Judgment of Clark is difficult: little appears to be known about the author's life and his motivation. He stresses the importance of non-Dublin speech and, in the chapters devoted to lexis, discusses "Celtic loans" (25-32), "Old English survivals" (32-39), survivals in dialect (39-43) and "dialect loans" (43-48, often Ulster words from Scots and Northern English). The richest collection is made up by more than a hundred 'Celtic loans', arranged according to semantic fields; as in Joyce, there are no indications of currency and the literary sources quoted do not help to settle the question of how common the words quoted were in Clark's time. 2.4. Todd's Words Apart. A Dictionary of Northern Ireland English (1990) is based on her own competence in the dialect and on data collected from friends and relatives; she grew up in Tyrone, studied at Belfast and has since analysed Ν IrE speech in a number of publications. Her compilation is in the 'Joycean' tradition: it was written with a great deal of enthusiasm and subjectivity, but represents the opposite of Oxford's insistence on having lexical features docu­ mented from printed sources. Her "Dictionary" (19-172) of some 1,300 items (30% of which are marked as obsolescent) concentrates on the Gaelic-derived part of Ν IrE lexis — which suggests that a fair proportion of these words is also known and perhaps used in parts of the Republic. The entries cover pro­ nunciation, definition, etymology and specimen sentences but without any docu­ mentation — they may have been heard, or found in written texts, or formulated for the purpose by the author. There are no style labels or other information on usage. Few of her words overlap with Joyce's entries (mostly the obvious words like banshee, brogue, bad cess etc. are shared), a difference which cannot be due only to the geographic or historical distance between the two compilers. An explanation of the divergence, putting the two lists in perspective, will be possible only on the basis of an exhaustive study of IrE lexis. 3. The list of testables My various lists of words relating to Irish culture were successively compiled from various sources:

'The following summary is based on Dolan's clear account (in Joyce 1910/1979:xvi-xx).

6 Irish English and Irish culture in dictionaries of English a) b) c)

d)

e)

175

reading Irish texts and noting difficult words in need of glossing (cf. the words from Synge's Playboy marked by an asterisk in my list);22 looking at glossaries (like Bliss's 1979 and Wall's 1986) and handbooks (like Serjeantson 1935 or Scheler 1977); selecting words from Joyce (1910) that seemed widespread enough to be likely to be included in at least a few dictionaries, and checking this list against Todd's (1990); analysing the 730-word list of OED words with alleged Irish etymology and another list of 230 items marked "AngloIrish;"23 adding a random list of words typical or suggestive of Irish culture, ranging from folklore, literature and music to political institutions, including proper names (and not only adjectives derived from such names, as is common Oxford practice); accepting further words suggested by colleagues after my lectures and a few contained in teaching materials prepared by Dolan.

Words from the following categories (though mentioned by, among others, Joyce 1910 and Clark 1917) were removed from my list with a few exceptions (+); the latter were retained in order to compare their coverage with that of more properly Irish items:24

22

That Synge's idiosyncratic language cannot be equated with rural 'IrE' need not to be stressed. In his lexicon, too, he did not attempt to render 'pure IrE', nor did he try to dis­ tinguish between different dialect areas and social classes (cf. Kiberd 1979:204: "A faker of peasant speech?"). Traditionally, investigations of regional lexis have perhaps given undue weight to literary texts (Wright 1898-1905); Clark stressed the lexis used by "writers like Griffin, Croker and Kickham, who represent the counties of Limerick, Cork and Tipperary" (1917:8), in order to capture provincial IrE. A great amount of James Joyce's language is even less dictionary-worthy; however, it is interesting to see that the vocabulary used in Finnegans Wake contains a great number of the words here analysed, in various distortions (cf. Ó Hehir 1967). However, as Wall (1986) has shown, there is also a great deal of genuine and undistorted IrE in his works (see my discussion below). H. Bonheim (p.c.) reminds me of the fact that words like planxty and twig are now known around the world among readers of Joyce because they are found in his works, and thus are in limited currency internationally — planxty of course also as the name of a well-known group of Irish folk singers. 23

The CD-ROM search yields all items whose etymology is marked "Irish" (not all of these correctly); "Anglo-Irish" appears to have been preferred for words like bonnyclabber, bad cess, colleen or loy which are attested in Irish literature written in English. However, the labels used in the OED are very inconsistent. 24

Other cases in which the decision to include them is problematic remain (and some of my decisions may well be changed). For instance, peeler as used by Synge in Playboy is difficult

176

f)

g)

h)

i)

j)

6

Irish English and Irish culture in dictionaries of English

words of (sometimes doubtful) Irish etymology which have lost their specific Irishness (brat, crag, bother, boycott, hooligan, larrikin [AusE], shagroon 'non-English settler' [NZE], shanty town, +smithereens25 and twig 'understand'); words relating to a common Celtic tradition which are often associated with Scotland rather than with Ireland (airt, caird, coronagh, fillibeg, kebbuck, Sassenach, shieling, spleuchan, sporran, tocher — and possibly also +ceilidh26); words more widely represented in dialect or informal (mostly British) speech, which have no particular bearing on Ireland (creel 'basket', drooth 'thirst', gomeril 'fool',+pismire 'ant', and slug 'drink');27 words referring to institutions or objects related to Irish history (obs. or hist.) too specialized to be included in any of the dictionaries except the OED, Wright, Joyce, or Todd (cf. note 11 above); distinctive senses of words in international use: although there would be some point in including words which have at least one specifically Irish meaning, I have refrained from doing so in the case of clever and mad (whose Irish meaning appears to be close to AmE), crack (from English and reborrowed from Irish into IrE) and brave, call ('claim, need'), case and ditch/dyke28, but I have retained +cog 'cheat (by copying)', cosher

because it is a dated BrE slang term for 'policeman', and therefore not specifically Irish. Another meaning is hist., namely 'Member of the Irish Constabulary founded by Peel, 181218' — in this case, the referent is too distant to justify an inclusion (although some dic­ tionaries, like Universal, do include it). 25

The word appears to have lost its Irishness around 1900; Joyce (1910:4) says it is "a grand word, and is gaining ground every day. Not very long ago I found it used in a public speech by a Parliamentary candidate — an Englishman." 26

For trans-Atlantic dictionaries, regionalisms are differently defined: ceilidh is marked in Random as "Irish, Scot, and Canadian (chiefly Prince Edward Island)", bonny clabber is "Northern and Midland U.S." and shebeen is marked "Scot., Irish Eng., South African." 27

Quin (1977:124) checked some fifty words from Joyce (1910) still current today against Wright and found that almost all were recorded for England and Scotland and therefore no proper Irishisms. 28

ditch and dyke are often claimed to have opposite meanings to their BrE counterparts; note that Synge has both contradictory meanings in Playboyv "in the furzy ditch" (= 'ditch'); "[...] looking over a low ditch or a high ditch [...]" (= 'dyke'). Griffin's footnote of 1827 is most explicit: "There is a curious inversion in the words pit, ditch and dyke, in the sister isle. A potato pit is an elevated mound of earth, containing potatoes. A ditch is a dyke, and a dyke

6

k)

1)

Irish English and Irish culture in dictionaries of English

177

'pauper', slob 'mire' and +wake 'the watching beside the body of a dead person'; words in current use in IrE (at least in 1910 according to Joyce) which have become obsolete in England (delph 'crockery', dis remember, strand 'beach'), illustrating 'colonial lag' (cf. Görlach 1987a and the valuable list of retentions in IrE in Bliss 1984:140-1); words in which only the spelling is distinctively Irish (lough, whiskey).

My main list and additional checklists of words from a) Todd, b) Joyce, c) the OED and d) various dictionaries and other sources were distributed to Irish audiences to test whether any of these are of at least limited currency today and might thus have a claim to be included in my standard list. 4. Analysis and summary of findings 4.1. Dictionaries used29 Advanced Barnhart

= =

Chambers

=

Cobuild

=

Collins

=

Longman Macquarie Oxf. Concise Oxf Enc. Random

= = = = =

SOED

=

The Advanced Learners Dictionary. Oxford, 41989. The Barnhart Dictionary of Etymology. New York: H.M. Wilson, 1988. Chambers English Dictionary. Cambridge & Edinburgh, 1988. Collins Cobuild English Language Dictionary. London & Glasgow, 1987 Collins Dictionary of the English Language. London & Glasgow, 1979; third ed. 1991 Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English. 21987'. The Macquarie Dictionary. Macquarie University. 21991. The Concise Oxford Dictionary. 81990. The Oxford Encyclopedic English Dictionary. 1991. The Random House Dictionary of the English Language. New York, 21987. The Shorter Oxford English Dictionary. 31944; New SOED 1993.

means a ditch" (Holland-Tide, 1827:fn. p. 4). 29

I checked the editions at hand which were not always the most recent ones, but I compared the second edition of the SOED (1993) and the third of Collins (1991) to illustrate how much change there has been — in the case of the SOED easily explained by the length of time separating it from the first edition. Dictionaries used only here are not in the References.

178

Universal

6 Irish English and Irish culture in dictionaries of English

=

The Universal Dictionary of the English Language, ed. H.C. Wyld. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1932.

4.2. Comparison of dictionaries A test of the 135 words provides a clear indication of the fulness of lexical information on Irish items in three British dictionaries (see table 1):30 In the 1980s, Chambers (96) was, somewhat unexpectedly, in conspicuous advance of Collins (69) and SOED (67).31 The differences may result from different editorial principles (the comprehen­ siveness of dictionaries is occasionally determined by considerations like the book's use in scrabble contests). We must also take into account the more recent date of two dictionaries revised in the 1980s against the SOED, which basically represents the state of the 1930s. A similar date of publication (but also its compiler's reluctance to include compounds and slang terms) explains why the Universal has only 58 items, although it is more comprehensive in technical/ historical words than most other dictionaries. The following 50 items listed in all three seem to provide a core of more or less accepted words that a full dictionary should include: ballyrag, banshee, begorra, blarney, bogtrotter, brogue (2x), carrageen, (bad) cess, colleen, collogue, cosher, crannog, Dáil, dudeen, Fenians, florin, galloglass, galluses, galore, gossoon, Hibernicism, Irish bull, Irish stew, keen, kern(e), leprechaun, mavourneen, Molly Maguire, noggin, Paddy, pismire, pollan, poteen, rapparee, (bad) scran, shamrock, shebeen, shillelagh, Sinn Fein, skean, slob, smithereens, spalpeen, squireen, stirabout, tanist and wake — a list which even in alphabeti­ cal order represents a fascinatingly distorted survey of Ireland's contribution to culture! One might have expected a much less comprehensive coverage in an American dictionary, so Random's 71 inclusions come as a surprise. And yet, there are noteworthy differences reflecting the geographical distance:

30

The following statistics are slightly uncertain because of spelling variants which can cause an entry to be overlooked; cf. banbh: bonnive: bonuv: bonham and pooka: puca.

31

Chambers was exceptional for the larger number of items found exclusively in this dic­ tionary: alpeen, bodach, boreen, cog, crubeen, drisheen, praiseach, shannachee, slane, tanaiste and ν oteen (= 11); by contrast, only 6 items have unique recordings in all the other dictionaries put together: begob, caubeen, coccagee, jackeen, kish and macushla. Taking into account more recent editions, all Chambers' words are now in NSOED, and jackeen and macushla are no longer uniquely attested.

6 Irish English and Irish culture in dictionaries of English

a) b) c)

179

More items than in European dictionaries are unmarked for Irishness {bejabers, blarney, broth of a boy, galore, keen n. & v., wake) Some words have a different, American, distribution indicated (bonnyclabber, ceilidh) All the compounds with Irish as first element are given, probably because they represent current AmE usage.

It is interesting to compare the slightly smaller Australian Macquarie and its 51 inclusions. Based on an Englishized American dictionary (Hanks 1971), the Macquarie editors explicitly claim that words were excised that had no rele­ vance for Australian speakers. With this intention in mind, it is remarkable that Irishisms like begorra, cess, mavourneen and technical terms like Oireachtas and shillelagh were retained. For items losing their Irishness, the unlabelled entry spalpeen is especially illustrative: "1. a workman or labourer. 2. a rascal; knave. 3. a boy." The break in the coverage comes where more modestly-sized learner's dic­ tionaries are concerned. The Advanced and Longman have an identical score of 24, and they include almost the same items, only that Advanced has begorra and Irish bull and Longman includes carrageen and crannog. This core lexis is drastically reduced in Cobuild, where only 14 entries are left. Here we are down to a minimal Irish lexis, most of it stereotypical, which allows us to understand a sentence like: At a ceilidh a paddy met a colleen, who spoke with a heavy brogue; there was blarney and whiskey galore from the nearby shebeen.

(Note that yet smaller dictionaries like the Oxford Mini omit paddy and colleen — but all are careful to indicate the difference between Irish whiskey and Scottish whisky). While the degree of coverage can be arranged in an implicational scale for most items, there are also exceptions or irregularities, most of which have to do with an editor's willingness to include a) colloquial or slang terms, b) com­ pounds and phrases and c) technical terms, the latter including items that are hist., archaic or obsolete, aspects which are analysed in the next section.

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Table 1: The representation of 135 'Irish' items in ten general dictionaries (asterisks indicate entries in recent editions) alanna(h) η my child alpeen η cudgel arrah excl (impatience) ballyrag ν scold /-u-/ *banbh, banham n piglet banshee η fairy barmbrack η bread with spiced fruits bawn η enclosure bawneen η flannel jacket begob(s) excl by God begorra excl by God bejabers excl by Jesus blarney η & ν flatter(y) bodach η churlish fellow bogtrotter η pej. Irishman bohaun η hut bonnyclabber η sour milk boreen η narrow road bosthoon η worthless fellow, clown bouchai n boy boxty η mashed potatoes boyo n rascal brehon η ancient judge brogue η (accent) brogue η (shoe) broth of a boy phr good fellow carrag(h)een η sea-weed caubeen η old hat ceilidh η evening of 'crack' cess (bad -) η bad luck cloghaun η group of buildings coccagee η cider (-apple) cog ν cheat (by copying) colleen η girl collogue ν conspire, converse cosher ν pamper crannog η lake-dwelling crawthumper η hypocrite *creel cart η cart with high movable sides crubeen η pig's trotter (food) cruskeen η pitcher culchie η provincial Dáil n Parliament donnybrook ν brawl drisheen η Irish sausage

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Irish English and Irish culture in dictionaries of English

dud(h)een n clay pipe -een suff. little famished adj cold Fenian η member of Irish assoc. Fianna Fail η Republican Party florin η creeping bent-grass Gaelic football η (with 15 players) Gaeltacht η Irish-speaking region galloglass η ancient soldier galluses η braces galore adv in plenty garda η police((wo)man) glaum ν grasp gombeen-man η usurer gossoon η boy greesach η cinders hedge school η open-air school Hibernicism η IrE feature Irish bull η illogical story Irish coffee η with whiskey Irish Free State Irish potato η potato Irish Republican Army, IRA phr. Irish stew η dish jackeen η Dubliner keen η wailing keen ν wail kern(e) η footsoldier Kilkenny cats Kiltartan(ese) η literary IrE kish η basket kittogue η left-handed person leprechaun η brownie loy η spade macushla mavourneen η dear one meeaw η ill-luck mitch ν play truant moil(ey) η hornless cow Molly Maguire n member of I. Society noggin η measure Oireachtas η legislature omadhawn η fool Paddy η Irishman pale η area of earliest English settlement

181

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pishogue n sorcery pismire η ant planxty η I. dance(-tune) pollan η whitefish pooka η goblin pookaun η fishing-boat pot(h)een η illicit whiskey praiseach η mess punt η Irish pound puss η face rapparee η plunderer rath η hill-fort rawmaish η nonsense scran, bad η bad luck scraw n sod, turf *scribe η strip of country Seanad η Ir. upper house sevendable adj excellent shamrock η clover, trefoil shannachee η storyteller (sea-) shaughraun adj wandering about shebeen η liquor-shop Shelta η secret jargon shillelagh η stout club shoneen η Anglophile Sinn Fein η Republican Party skean, skene η dagger Slainte! cheers! slane η turf spade sleeveen n sly fellow slob η mire smithereens η shivers, pieces spalpeen η rascal squireen η petty squire stirabout η porridge, bustler streel v trail, wander *streeleen η loose talk, untidy person tanaiste η deputy prime minister tanist η chief's heir taoiseach η Ir. prime minister Teague η Irishman traneen η grass stalk, trifle tully eye η squint voteen η devotee wake η vigil beside corpse

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183

4.3. Comparison of word groups The main distinction is between foreignisms, i.e. words referring to Irish objects and institutions on the one hand, and heteronyms (including dialect words) for which BrE equivalents exist on the other. Longer, more scholarly dictionaries tend to include more foreignisms, but they may well exclude names — even though modern dictionaries are increasingly 'encyclopedic'. la)

lb)

lc) 1d)

le)

1f) 2)

32

Old Irish history: The comparatively large number of items shows how much Ireland's history is of interest; the number of inclusions partly depends on the encyclopedic nature of the dictionary: crannog (8), shillelagh, spalpeen and tanist (7), galloglass32, pale and squireen (5), Molly Maguire and rapparee (4), hedge school and rath (3). Modern Irish history: The acceptance of names in their Gaelic forms is noteworthy: Dáil (9), Sinn Fein (8), Fenians (7), Oireachtas (6), Fianna Fail (5) and Seanad, Gaeltacht and Irish Free State (4). However, tanaiste (1) and taoiseach (2), found in all Irish newspapers, are only poorly represented. Irish folklore: The few items are well represented: banshee (10), leprechaun (9), Kilkenny cats and pishogue (4), pooka (3). Irish plants & animals: Rather fewer words than one might have expected seem to have entered the English vocabulary: pollan and carrageen (5), florin (4), coccagee (1). Daily life: there are only a few words, some of them reflecting traditional stereotypes: brogue (shoe) and wake (10), poteen and shebeen (9), dudeen (6), ceilidh, gombeen-man and stirabout (5), barmbrack and bonnyclabber (4) and Gaelic football (2). Note the recent Irishisms garda 'police((wo)man)', (2) with various combinations, and punt 'Irish pound' (3) as a monetary unit. Music etc.: Only planxty (3) is recorded. Dialect words fare quite badly: mavourneen (5) is represented surprisingly well, but loy (2) and macushla, alpeen, boreen, caubeen, crubeen, drisheen, kish, praiseach (1) are rare; bohaun, bosthoon, bouchai, cruskeen, culchie, greesach, kittogue, meeaw, moil(ey), moulleen, sevendable, shaughraun, colloquialisms like jackeen, shoneen and

Higher figures might well be expected for galloglass because the word occurs in Macbeth (I.ii.13).

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6 Irish English and Irish culture in dictionaries of English

sleeveen(ism) and Synge's words banbh, creel cart, houseen, scribe and streeleen are not recorded at all.33 3a)

3b)

3c)

Linguistic stereotypes and stage Irish are represented by very few items and in selected dictionaries: colleen (10), bad cess and begorra (7), bejabers, broth o f a boy and cosher (4). Derogatory terms for Irishmen: Paddy (10), but the more dated bogtrotter (7) and even earlier Teague (3) are less well recorded. Terms for language etc. include brogue (10), Hibernicism (7) and more technical Shelta (6). Words that have become common core and lost their Irishness have in general been excluded from my list. However, I retained blarney (n. + v.), galore, shamrock and smithereens for comparison, which have all the expected full score (10). The same applies to a few words of debated origin.

The few items that stand out as Irish in dictionaries of various sizes come from a very large range of domains, styles and degrees of vitality; their small number does not permit classification of the Irish impact and its representation in dictionaries according to topics. The marginality of this impact on the English lexicon, however, is confirmed. 4.4. Style The stylistic labels most frequently met with — apart from 'Irish' — are: hist. for words referring to items known from the history of Ireland, arch.l obsolescent for words which belong to 19th-century (Victorian) diction and which are rarely found outside jocular or poetic contexts today {galore, keen 'wail').34 33

The absence of dialect lexis is even more apparent if other words finally excluded from my list are added: amplush 'difficulty', aroon 'my dear', clawber 'mud', cleean 'in-law', coonagh 'friendly', cooramagh 'careful', flahool(agh) 'generous', girsha 'girl', grumagh 'gloomy', keeroge 'beetle', kippeen 'stick', mearing 'boundary', oanshagh 'female fool', paddereen 'rosary',praskeen 'apron', rawmaish 'nonsense', scullogue 'small farmer', shannachus 'chat', suggan 'hay rope' and whillaloo 'lamentation' were all accepted at least by some of my Irish informants, but are not found in any of the dictionaries consulted. The coverage was slightly improved in recent editions, see 4.5. 34 OED1 found dudeen 'clay-pipe' was "now generally known in Great Britain, and esp. in the British colonies and U.S.", a statement now corrected to "in the late 19th century" in OED2, which explains the fact that the word is now generally omitted from dictionaries. Cf. the style description in Universal (1932): "In England where the word is only known from dictionaries, or books on Ireland [...]; in Ireland [...] the word is known to most, though only used jocu­ larly [...]." By contrast, punt 'Irish £' is slowly making its way into English dictionaries.

6

Irish English and Irish culture in dictionaries of English

185

These two categories pertain to Irish society of the past; the verse below is illustrative of such pre-industrial rural society, which is as obsolete as is the crofting society of the Highlands and the shtetl of Eastern Europe. In the early 19th century, McCall (Wexford, quoted from Joyce 1910:189) found that the accomplishments of an Irishman should be: To To To To

smoke his dudheen, drink his cruiskeen, flourish his alpeen, wallop a spalpeen.

Other terms (still) contain a derogatory or amused tone, as is evident from the terms and facetious comparisons applied to 'Irishmen' or qualities ascribed to Irish conditions. Partridge (1984:600-1) lists the following specimens: Irish apricot 'potato', Irish confetti 'brickbats', Irish harp 'shovel', Irish hurricane 'a flat calm with drizzling rain', and Irish rise 'a reduction in pay or position'. Finally, retentions (not investigated here) would have to be marked arch. exc. Ir.; meanings, whether they represent older use (as is possibly the case with mad and clever) or uses closer to the Gaelic etymologies (cosher means 'feast' in Ireland, but 'pamper' elsewhere), would have to be combined and their stylistic restrictions indicated. Since stylistic labelling is one of the most precarious jobs in lexicography, readers will not be surprised that the dictionaries analysed here disagree markedly; there is obviously room for scholarly investigation. 4.5. 'Diachronie lexicography' Dictionaries normally grow from edition to edition; the inclusion of new words is much more common than the rejection of old entries. This is partly because of new words for new concepts (like garda 'police' or punt 'Irish pound'), but also because data analysis, or a comparison with competitors on the dictionary market, make editors aware of gaps. I compared two editions which became available after my first draft was complete, viz. the New Shorter Oxford English Dictionary (1993) and the third edition of Collins (1991), two books which showed particularly drastic changes from earlier editions. Since the SOED had not been substantially revised since 1944, the contents of the NSOED were expected to differ considerably from its predecessor: the poor representation of 67 Irish items in the SOED (= 50% of the words checked) was in fact notably improved — by another 51 items which now brings the total to 118 (= 87.4%). This comprehensiveness was achieved not only by the inclusion of modern items — only garda, Oireachtas, punt, Seanad, tanaiste and

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6 Irish English and Irish culture in dictionaries of English

taoseach would probably qualify — but much more by a more liberal attitude towards regional forms of English, a policy also documented by the inclusion of a great number of non-BrE words from elsewhere around the world. The increase in Collins' 68 items by 20 additions is much less dramatic; in fact it does not even bring the number of the entries to that in the older Chambers (95). However, it is quite obvious that the new Collins was revised with great care — aditions concern established words of reasonable frequency in text types ranging from literature to newspaper reports which are likely to cause difficulties to a great number of non-Irish readers. Only a detailed analysis of all the major dictionaries published in Britain over the past few years, in all their revised editions, could provide a reliable picture of how these books have been complemented, and of possible interconnections between these efforts. In particular, it would be tempting to compare the representation of IrE with the coverage over the past few years and to check whether the increase in Irish items was greater than for other varieties. It may well have been — if only because there were more grievous gaps to fill and because there is no regional dictionary of IrE so that general dictionaries have an even greater obligation to include the most important vocabulary of IrE, or of words designating Irish culture. 5. Are dictionaries of IrE needed? 5.1. The status of a language and lexicography National norms have never been defined for IrE lexis; as we have seen, not even the spade work has been done that must precede codification. There is a wide­ spread feeling, not only among naive speakers, that the 'languageness' of a variety is enhanced by its having a grammar, a dictionary and a Bible for or in it. Croghan has pointed to the confused status of present-day IrE and the historical reasons for this: [...] some writers in the last two centuries used the bogus brogue-write in mistake for real language, and Hiberno-English and brogue-write have also been confused by numerous scholars who write about the language of Irish literature. Nor is it surprising that Hiberno-English has been neglected, officially, in Ireland. The preservation and restoration of Irish had played the key role in the ideology of the independence movement from the last third of the nineteenth century through to the uprising in 1916, and this would be represented in the official documents of the new state; anyway, it was hardly likely that anyone would officially acknowledge a language code which was often exploited to portray the Irish as fools and idiots. (1990:31)

6 Irish English and Irish culture in dictionaries of English

187

However, no official status has been recognized for IrE in the Constitution of the Republic, and the acceptance of St BrE must give support to the traditional attitude that IrE is a provincial, low and slightly amusing variety. National independence is also a linguistic question — but as the USA and Australia show, independence does not require a different language — it is good enough to accept your own variety and codify the deviation from the nearest standard form, BrE in the case of the Irish. This codification would include, as one of the most important elements, a national dictionary. 5.2. An exclusive dictionary of IrE A scholarly historical dictionary of IrE is undoubtedly long overdue; it should list all the words peculiar to the island, whether these are current or obsolete, formal or slang, Gaelic- or English-derived, spoken or written, technical or literary, local or national. Criteria for inclusion in dictionaries of -isms have been discussed in the prefaces of such books and in articles (cf. Görlach 1991a).35 As indicated above, items would come especially from three groups: words relating to Irish culture ('foreignisms'), words found in a greater number of Irish writers (like Synge or Joyce) and wide-spread dialect words or colloquialisms of present-day IrE. A preparatory list as the core of such a compilation could be gathered from the relevant entries in Poole (1867), Wright (1898-1905), Joyce (1910), Clarke (1917), van Rijckeghem (1986), Todd (1990) and Macafee (fa), with a judicious choice of items from glossaries like Bliss's (1979) and local collections like Traynor's (1953), Henry's (1957) and Ó Maoláin's (1979). As far as I know several attempts have — unsurprisingly — been made to compile such a Dictionary of Irish English on Historical

35

Macafee's description of the principles of inclusion are particularly relevant because they might serve for an all-Ireland dictionary: [...] the collection will exclude senses current in Standard English or wide­ spread in English slang. Non-standard words, compounds, and less predictable derivatives are considered for inclusion, along with non-standard forms (eg. tay 'tea') and non-standard senses of vocabulary in itself part of the standard lexicon (eg. bullet 'a home-made bowl used in a traditional game played on the roadway'). To save time and space, most phrases are excluded, where the sense is clear from the meaning of the individual words. Irish loan-words are considered for inclusion if they have undergone some alteration in form or sense in being borrowed into English, though many will still be excluded on the suspicion of simply being bad Irish. This leaves a large body of unassimilated loans, mainly from Donegal. (Macafee 1994)

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6 Irish English and Irish culture in dictionaries of English

Principles, but none of them has come to anything.36 A point in urgent need of discussion would be how far dialect words (Ó Maoláin 1979, Traynor 1953) should be included in a general dictionary, or whether a separate IDD is preferable (cf. the division of lexis between OED and EDD). Moreover, criteria must be formulated as to which items in written or spoken texts were meant and felt to be indicators of code-switching, i.e. are intended to be Irish rather than IrE. By contrast, currency is not so much a problem for a historical dictionary as for an inclusive one (5.3.). 5.3. An inclusive dictionary of IrE We would have to find out how much the lexis of a national variety of English diverges from international standards (or those of its closest neighbour) in order to decide whether a national inclusive dictionary is needed. The Oxford Concise and Pocket series have now produced variant editions adapted to the needs of Australians, New Zealanders and South Africans; a Concise Dictionary for Canada, and another for the Caribbean are in the making, but I have not heard of such books adapted to the needs of, say, Indian, West African, Scottish or Irish speakers of English. It could be argued that dictionaries like those pro­ duced by Chambers cover an adequate part of the Scottish regional lexicon (but compare Aitken's negative findings quoted above) and that a special dictionary for Ireland is unnecessary. If this argument were based on the small number of potential users (and buyers) of such a book, the fact that there are as many Irishmen as there are New Zealanders would undermine the point. If the claim were based on the lack of lexical distance of IrE, the matter would require a careful linguistic analysis, if we want to avoid the charge of being impression­ istic. It is indeed likely that the unity of European forms of English (handily, but not quite adequately called 'British English') is greater than many Scotsmen and Irishmen are willing to admit; but it is important to see that this statement is as impressionistic as is the basis of argumentation of those who demand linguistic devolution, independence or home rule. A test of the knowledge of words in the community does not necessarily permit straightforward conclusions about whether they should be included in a dictionary: a word may be well-known, but colloquial or slang and therefore not considered dictionary-worthy. On the other hand, special or archaic terms are often unknown — and the explicit function of the dictionary is to help the 36

Alan Bliss, an Englishman, appears to have proceeded furthest towards collections for a historical dictionary of IrE, but the relevant papers have not been traced (T. Dolan, p.c.); T. Dolan (p.c.) is now preparing the long-awaited Dictionary of Hiberno-English (= Dolan fc).

6 Irish English and Irish culture in dictionaries of English

189

reader in these difficulties. I have tested various Irish audiences giving them a choice of five options: the item was to be marked as 'known' (but not used), 'used' (indicate, if only in Irish, but not in IrE), and 'dictionary-worthy'; unmarked, if not known (the latter applied also to words where the informants corrected the meaning to something quite unrelated). It was interesting to compare Irish and non-Irish speakers (mostly people who had lived and taught for some time in Ireland): the latter generally knew far fewer words — but they might also know words unknown to some Irish speakers. A well-known argument in favour of a national dictionary is derived from the intelligibility of texts in the national literatures. 19th-century writers who obviously preferred not to have a glossary attached, and whose readers had no appropriate dictionary available, solved the problem in a number of related ways, which can be illustrated from Banim's practice: 1. Items may be unmarked, intelligibility depending on the context: arrah, bawn, brogues, musha, the Pale; this is regular also with words when they occur for a second time. 2. Items are included in double inverted commas: "wake," "laid out." 3. Words are italicized and followed by a translation in the text: shanachus, reverend gossip; croonawn, or song; suguch, in Scotch fou, Anglice approaching to intoxication. 4. Items are accompanied by an asterisk referring to a gloss in a footnote: ould bouchai *old boy; shingawn *a diminutive being.

This procedure makes it possible for the readers to understand the text as the author wanted it to be understood; existing dictionaries are, by contrast, of little help.37 Intelligibility is also a problem for more recent and better known texts: is it, for instance, possible to read Synge's Playboy with the help of the dictionaries tested? Not one of these records the words banbh, houseen, to over it, puesteen, and streeleend Synge was careful to contextualize most of his difficult words. He did so for banbh when he wrote: "he'd put the fear of death into the banbhs and the screeching sows", where the meaning 'pigs' can be guessed; if not, little is missed. In the case of houseen and puesteen the items add the suffix -een to well-known English words, and the phrase "he never overed it" for 'he never got

37

It is difficult to decide whether items misused by 19th-century writers, whose competence in Irish was often not sufficient, should be considered in dictionaries at all. 38

The list is only a very small selection; it does not include any of the numerous words used with a meaning different from that in BrE, either; banbhlbonham was added to NSOED and Collins 31991.

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6 Irish English and Irish culture in dictionaries of English

over it' is again clear from the context. However, the words scribes and streeleen can only be guessed: "looking over [...] a high ditch [...] into stony, scattered fields or scribes of bog" "if you weren't destroyed travelling, you'd have as much talk and streeleen ('loose talk')"

My test of dictionaries of various sizes and places of publication yielded only negative results for all of these 'Syngean' words. Whether they should be included depends on the question of how much weight is to be given to purely dialectal lexis in literary texts. It is quite a different matter, and even more surprising, that whereas there is hardly a Burns edition without a glossary, no such help is commonly provided for readers of The Playboy of the Western World. As Wall's (1986) glossary convincingly shows, James Joyce's lexis (even where not 'distorted' by linguistic word-play) is not fully interpretable with the help of common dictionaries, either. True enough, a great number of more common Irishisms found in his works are included {poteen, shebeen, etc.), but there are also many dialect words recorded from recent spoken and written IrE where no such help is available — and many others which sound authentic but are not found in other sources, and for which Wall's glosses are the only help. Since Van Rijckeghem (1986) is not generally accessible, the book is not of much help, either. Are dictionaries at least more useful when it comes to newspaper texts? Even the title pages of Irish quality newspapers tend to have Seanad 'senate', taoiseach 'prime minister' and tanaiste 'deputy prime minister' in their Irish forms, and garda 'police(wo)man', in various combinations {student-, trainee-, detective-', -car, -station, etc.) appears to have practically ousted St E police and policeman. And yet, only Chambers and Oxf Enc included these terms central to Irish institutions in the 1980s, and the two were also quick to include punt, a term which appears to be more frequently used outside Ireland than in the country itself (where Irish pound, Ir £ is still preferred). By contrast, all these items are becoming common in editions of dictionaries of the 1990s. There are also oversights: Sleeveenism is found on the title page of Irish dailies (Feb. 1993), but there is no entry in any of the dictionaries consulted. 6. Conclusions It is hoped, and indeed likely, that the next few years will see major publications contributing to a fuller description of IrE lexis: the (announced) publication of

6

Irish English and Irish culture in dictionaries of English

191

Ó Maoláin's rural Kilkenny vocabulary will complement Traynor's for Donegal (1953); van Rijckeghem's collection of words in printed sources of the 20thcentury and Macafee's forthcoming Ulster Dictionary are even closer to the much-needed Dictionary of IrE. All these efforts can and should be included in the major project of an exclusive dictionary continued by Dolan and Ó Muirithe. If these lexicographical projects are realized, it will also be much easier for international dictionaries to decide which of the entries should be included in them; if their number proves large enough, an inclusive dictionary should be seriously considered. Ireland, England's oldest colony, exhibits in its regional English many features of 'colonial lag', a feature which is one of the causes — but certainly not the only cause — of the distinctness of IrE. However, there is no reason why 'colonial lag' should also be a feature of Irish lexicography, and we all look forward to seeing the major gaps filled within the near future.

PUNCH

A

N D P A D D Y.

TEXT TYPES AND INDIAN ENGLISH

1. Introduction1 The spread of English around the world, especially in the course of the last two hundred years, has had a great variety of political, economic and cultural consequences. Among these, the study of what has become of the English language in the process of its geographical expansion is a topic that has grown into an independent and flowering subdiscipline of sociolinguistics (cf. ch. 1). In the course of its history, the focus of linguistic description has taken various wrong turns; this means that there is still a great deal left to do for scholars interested in historical sociolinguistics. First, there was a phase in which varieties which have only recently come to be accepted as 'New Englishes' were looked down upon as barbarous corrup­ tions in the mouths of less educated speakers; the linguist's job was to put things right by remedial education (and this task might not even include a proper description of the deviant variety). Second, such déviances were of interest only if they could be neatly classified according to linguistic levels — spelling, pronunciation, morphology, syntax, and lexis. (Such descriptions could, then, in turn be misunderstood as prescrip­ tive and be used as corrective tools for those who felt a need for them). However, linguists did not sufficiently understand how the non-European functions which the language was given, for example in India, made more thorough forms of adaptation necessary: the deviances, striking as they might appear in the areas of non-BrE pronunciation and syntax, were in fact more fundamental in the fields of pragmatics and stylistics (cf. Kachru 1983).

1 The present paper is partly based on my discussion of text types, with illustrative specimens, in Görlach (1992a and ch. 6 in 1995a). The writings of B.B. Kachru and the forthcoming collection of IndE texts gathered and interpreted by R.R. Mehrotra were also very stimulating; the latter also kindly allowed me to use two of the texts in his collection, and supplied me with two copies of cookery books and a few issues of regional newspapers. A shorter version of this paper was presented at the Anglistentag 1993 and has since appeared in the Proceed­ ings (= Görlach 1994b).

7

Text types and Indian English

193

It has to be realized that a second language is by definition restricted to a limited set of intranational functions; not having any sizeable number of native speakers in the speech community, it cannot be expected to exhibit the full range of styles, domains and text types. There are, in particular, four interrelated reasons for this which should form part of any hypothesis put forward to account for the evidence: 1.

The limited input of English under colonial administration (predominantly written, and concentrating on texts like the Bible in the Authorized Version; administrative/legal texts; literature ranging from Shakespeare and Milton to the Romantic poets and 19th-century novelists: the classical canon of English grammar schools and universities).

2.

The restricted uses of English in South Asian life, not employed where native textual traditions existed which were fully adequate for the functions envisaged.

3.

Native concepts of stylistic decorum with regard to text types (as defined in the Indian spectrum) and conventionalized in the tradition of indig­ enous languages, say Hindi, Urdu or Tamil. Certain features which strike a British or American speaker of English may well be consequences of stylistic or pragmatic carry-overs from native traditions ('loan style').

4.

The creation of new ESL text types which have no equivalent in BrE or AmE, but are conventional and normal in the native culture (e.g. the Indian type of matrimonial advertisements).

A checklist of sociolinguistic and structural questions may therefore help to focus the investigation (quoted from Görlach 199lc:261): 1.

Which text types are not found in English and never have been?

2.

Which text types are locally only represented by IntE — either because such books are always imported, or written by expatriates?

3.

If local Englishes are used, what present-day regional and social variation is there (as in the metropolitan vs. provincial contrast in many anglophone countries' daily newspapers, which combines with the tabloid vs. quality contrast to form very intricate patterns)?

4.

Has there been a historical development within the genre, and in what ways have existing deficiencies been filled (indigenous developments, or through borrowing of styles from BrE, AmE or other forms of English)?

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7 Text types and Indian English

5.

How conspicuous are 'misuses' of register found in the individual category, and are these to be explained by carry-over of features from related text types? How important are stylistic traditions and expectations in the local languages, i.e. how far can deviances from IntE be explained as stylistic caiques?

6.

What new text types have developed in regional Englishes to fill communicative needs, and how do (5.) features in old and new text types compare?

7.

What evidence of stylistic 'colonial lag' is found in individual text types in different varieties, i.e. do some local traditions strike us as markedly 'Victorian'?

Not all text types can, then, be expected to be characteristic of the new uses and linguistic structures of transported English. Since no comprehensive study of the topic has ever been undertaken for IndE, or any other ESL variety (and therefore certainly not in a contrastive way, either2), my survey must be very provisional. Also, it is not at all easy to define in a scholarly way which text types are particularly deviant, for what reasons and in what linguistic features.3 Labru (1984:54f.) appears to be mistaken when he restricts his argument to 'registers' which have no equivalent in British culture; he claims that: Not all the registers of Indian English are distant from their counterparts in English English. Some of India's institutions such as law, administration, academies, the national press and the parliament, etc., are modeled on British institutions. Indian English is not, therefore, too markedly 'Indian' in the registers pertaining to these subjects, the following being the least deviant registers of Indian English: 1. 2.

The legal-political-constitutional registers; The academic register, particularly science and technology;

2

Note the approach in Platt et al. (1984) which — stressing the features shared by ESL varieties — might have been extended to include text types (but has not been so far). 3

Kachru (1982:364) points to the transplantation of English rhetorical styles into a South Asian context, and the importance of native ideas of propriety and stylistic embellishment, adding that "the reaction of native English speakers to such 'deviant' communicative styles and rhetorical devices has not been one of understanding, as exemplified by the use of attitudinally marked terms such as Latinity, phrase-mongering, polite diction, moralistic tone, or bookishness." He discusses matrimonial advertisements, announcements of death, personal letters, legal and administrative language, and forms of South Asian literature as exemplifying the nativization of English in Indian contexts. Also cf. Y. Kachru (1995).

7 Text types and Indian English 3. 4.

195

Officialese; Journalese.

(Note that he partly contradicts his own hypothesis which is explicitly based on the deviance of journalese in IndE). I will here concentrate on text types that promise to yield material for discussion and interpretation discussed in sections 2. to 10. below, viz.:4 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10.

Newspaper reports and leaders Book announcements and reviews Dedications, forewords and endpieces in scholarly books Scholarly expository prose Advertisements of various types Death notices and obituaries Letters and essays Cookery recipes Literature: poems and prose

Each of the sections will be preceded by a short exposition explaining the sociohistorical conditions for the text type in a South Asian context, followed by an interpretation of the specimens chosen. It should be stated in advance that the twofold selection — that of specific text types, and of individual specimens from these — brings with it the danger of putting together a linguistic chamber of horrors (compare the danger also inherent in larger projects like the text volumes of the VEAW series, e.g. Todd 1982). This is not my intention, but readers should be warned at the outset that not all the specimens in the text types in question are as 'densely Indian' as the ones here interpreted. Recent advances in corpus linguistics suggest that it will in future be possible to correlate salient linguistic features with sociolinguistic and stylistic categories much better than before and, in due course, to replace impressionistic statements based on hunches by hard facts based on statistical frequencies.5 4

Some types promise to yield sufficient evidence, but are not easily available. Labru notes that "Indian officialese would surely reward the researcher with a rich linguistic haul", but "files and official correspondence are difficult to obtain" (1984:ix). The collection assembled by Mehrotra (fc.) contains text types like welcome addresses (the term is itself an Indianism), obituaries, market trends, sports reports, health bulletins, question box, astrological forecasts, invitations, public notices, telegrams, and opening sentences in letters. Many of these types can be collected only by a scholar resident in the country. 5

However, the promising research by Biber & Finegan (cf. 1989 and 1992) has not been applied to regional/national varieties, let alone to the ENL/ESL contrast, so far; the analysis of IndE has not progressed to a point that would enable one to assess how useful computer

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7 Text types and Indian English

2. Newspaper reports and leaders The English-medium press was firmly established in 19th-century India, and has remained the most influential print medium to date, even if some papers in Bengali, Tamil and Hindi have a considerable circulation.6 Metropolitan papers like The Times of India exhibit, in their news reports and leaders, little that deviates from IntE (apart from the fact that they include local topics and words referring to these). However, the more provincial papers are marked by more conspicuous non-standard features. It is difficult to say how much of this is just owing to writers' deficiencies in grammar, lexis or appropriate style, and whether metropolitan papers exhibit less of this as a result of expatriates' assistance in editing. Labru, who made the most recent investigation of Indian newspaper English (1984, based on 1967 data), explicitly (albeit not linguistically precisely) argues for analysing this type of English in linguistic analysis: The average langue of Indian English that this study postulates is that of regional English dailies in India. Unlike the national dailies, the regional dailies in India are not too elegant or highbrow. Nor are the regional dailies examples of poor English. They are what Indian English generally is in writing — functional and middlebrow. The choice of a corpus of newspaper English (journalese) is by no means an attempt to denigrate it. Newspapers account for the largest English readership in India and, moreover, are easy to lay hands on (1984:ix).

My first excerpt comes from such a provincial paper, The Deccan Chronicle of 23rd October, 1985. The author's (Di Yes) English is characterized by a)

grammatical deviations (lack of concord, wrong prepositions, and a totally garbled final sentence (which carries a particular emphasis) and

b)

overuse of his favourite clichés {call it..., what meets the eye) and strange metaphors {ripples, snowball).

assistance will be for questions treated in my paper (cf. Shastri 1988). Overall, it seems wise not to expect too much: the grid used to classify individual texts and to structure such corpora is not very specific, and social categories, especially those of ESL users in non-native con­ texts, tend to be neglected in projects like the International Corpus of English (cf. the critical assessment by Schmied 1990). 6

According to the most recent data available, the circulation of English-medium papers is (in thousands) Indian Express 1,060, Times of India 500, The Hindu 426 etc. as against Ananda BP 391 (Bengali), Daily Thanti 322 (Tamil), Navbharat Times 258 (Hindi).

7 Text types and Indian English

197

Murder of an intrepid editor The cold-blooded murder of Pingle Dasaratharam, the 29-year-old intrepid editor of Telugu fortnightly, Encounter, at Vijayawada on Sunday night, has caused a great deal of consternation among various sections of people. The murder has come particularly in circumstances which lends itself to all kinds of guesses and supicions, for one thing that the powers that have been planning action. Encounter Editor was unsparing to any one that mattered in public, life with no holds barred on language to drive his point. Call it exposure or key-hole journalism, the fortnightly attracted sizeable readership for the spicy, juicy, or call it sweet and sour stuff. The more orthodox would call the writing foul and vulgar, the unorthodox might call it bold and forthright, and those affected naturally say it is rubbish, while the authorities unhesitatingly dub it as yellow. Whatever the tone and content of the journal be, the heinous murder of the Editor while going in a rickshaw by two unidentified assailants ought to cause more than ripples in the Government. It is not enough to say that investigations are in progress. The circumstances demand a sense of urgency because of the grave misgivings. Was he killed or got killed and by whom? Was it due to any private feud or for his professional activities? Whatever the motivations, the Chief Minister has done well in abandoning the proposal, which had threatened to snowball. But the elation that should have caused by his statement has been marred by the gruesome murder of the Encounter Editor, which is bound to have an adverse impact on the profession. You can not treat it as a "good riddance" of an yellow journalist. Any laxity to bring to book the culprit or culprits would mean more than what meets the eye. Afterall there have been intolerant politicians, in and out of power, whose attitude had often been like "end it you cannot mend". Could the Encounter Editor's doing away was one such? Occasionally, his craving for the more erudite expression has rendered his text completely unintelligible. There is a strange contrast between two passives (was killed — got killed) and overformal subjunctive be. As far as lexis is concerned, there is the (not unexpected) stylistic uncertainty. The writer wavers between a preference for the unusual word (consternation!, unsparing) and highly collo­ quial diction (call it sweet and sour stuff). The editorial from Hyderabad (1978, below) exhibits a similar array of grammatical deviances (lack of concord, irregular article use, did ... had) and stylistic infelicities (to ply, wink, knacking) as well as local words (autorickshaws, furlong, pavement shops). The impression of provinciality is en­ hanced by shaky typesetting and peculiar word-divisions (thro-ugh, ricks-haws).

198

7 Text types and Indian English The Skyline Traffic nightmare Very few cities in the country present such a picture of traffic hazards as Hyderabad which may in sense be proud of the maximum number of threewheeled ricks=haws and bicycles. To add to this nightmare have come in a big way the auto-rickshaws which zoom past thro=ugh the narrowest lanes and bylanes. When roads were planned, little did those in authority had visualised the phenomenal growth in vehicular traffic. And to cap it, the police and the municipal authorities ahve done precious little to mend matters. If any thing, both these official agencies have been generous in adding to the problem by liberally increasing the number of licences and permits of autos and rickshaws to ply. [...]

3. Book announcements and reviews (cf. Görlach 1991c) India is among the leading publishing nations; the share that English-language books have of total production is disproportionate considering the fact that only 3% of the population are said to speak English (which suggests that the number of readers may be even smaller). Most of these books are made for local consumption but there are also quite a few export firms supplying Indian books abroad. The 141 short descriptions of books offered by IBD Exports in their catalogue of 1989 were obviously made locally and not proofread or stylistically revised by expatriate native speakers of English. Their writers carried over much of the florid diction in which the books are written, condensing this element in the process. While such texts may well be effective in their combination of features designed to inform and please, the mixture strikes a native speaker of English as slightly odd. Note also the frequency of typos (which are the typesetters' fault) and grammatical mistakes such as lack of concord etc. (for which the typesetters are probably not responsible). (a)

LADAKH The weather-scarred moonscope of Ladakh leaves an indelible impression on all those who visit it. Ladakh dominantly Tibetan. Long isolated from the outside world has become a prime destination in India. N.N.'s stunning photography vividly captures many aspects of this enchanting & mysterious area.

(b)

HIMALAYAN IMAGES The book deals with the distinctive history, myth and floklore as well as the severity and splendour of the enternal snows, turbulence and tranquility of the rivers through its colourful and breath-taking photographs.

7 Text types and Indian English (c)

SIDDHARTHA A novel of great pellucid beauty [...] subtle distillation of wisdom, stylistic grace and symmetry of form.

(d)

THE TAJ AND FATEHPUR SIKRI Taj — the ethereal monument to love, conceived by Shahjahan in memory of his beloved wife Mumtaj Mahal. The Taj has never failed to inspite writes arstists & layman down through the centuries. Fatehpur Sikri — The resplendant imperial capital of Mughal emperor, Akbar the Great. The two represent a remarkable testimony to the grandeur of Mughal India.

(e)

DISCOVERY OF KAPILVASTU Many important places related to the Buddhism got lost into oblivion along with the extinction of the Buddhism from India, the country of its birth. Perhaps the most important of these was Kapilvastu, the capital of Sudodhana, the father of Gautama.

199

Such style is not restricted to blurbs and other forms of advertising; compare the scholarly style in section 5. below. 4. Dedications, forewords and endpieces in scholarly books The long tradition of scholarly writing in Indian languages tends to prefer the select and sonorous expression rather than the technically precise. Whereas such styles in scientific writing were criticised by Bacon, curbed by the Royal Society and finally overcome in Victorian England, they live on to a certain extent in IndE, supported by traditions in the indigenous literary languages. From parts of the collections of the Indian Institute Library, Oxford, I have selected books written by South Asian authors and published by Indian firms. Some stylistic revision by BrE native-speaker editors cannot be excluded in any of these texts, but what deviant features remain must certainly be illustrative of local styles and grammar. Not all the texts I looked at exhibit the striking features documented in my selection: more recent texts appear to exhibit them less frequently. Nevertheless, the excerpts serve to illustrate tendencies which are, to a greater or lesser degree, found in many types of IndE texts (cf. newspaper reports, which exhibit a similar stylistic cline). (a)

(Dedication) Dedicated/with profound respect and admiration/to/Shivaji the Great/the illustrious founder of/the original Maratha State/in grateful recogni­ tion/of his manifold services to our country/as the national hero of unequalled merit/and versatile genius. (R.V. Nadkarni, M.A., The Rise and Fall of the Maratha Empire. Bombay: Popular Prakashan, 1966)

(b)

To revert to Prof. NN, I owe him another debt: he graciously put on the mantle of (X), the 'Control' in our test contributed the idea of 'linguistic logistics' in language planning. I wish, also, to record my sincere and warm appreciation of the patient and ungrudging effort put into the reading of the

200

7 Text types and Indian English corpus by my British flatmates [...]. In doing this work and a lot more the British Council was my mainstay. [...] (Labru 1982:xi)

(c)

(Introductory passage) The word culture is one of the characters that has suffered the most ups-and-downs in all languages, in a universal masquerade of misunderstanding. Clarity is, therefore, essential so far as the connotation of the term 'culture' is concerned. In this connection attention may be drawn to the content of culture as decided by the members of the Indian Congress for Cultural Freedom [...] 1951 (M.L. Vidyarthi, Cultural History of India. New Delhi: Meerut, 41977).

(d)

{From a foreword) This period of Maratha history is, indeed, writ in tears and sorrows and suffering [...] But the national mind is best irrigated by tears, and suffering is a necessary prelude to rebirth. (A.C. Banerjee, M.A., Peshwa Madhar Rao I. Calcutta: Mukherjee, 1943)

(e)

{From the end of a foreword): [...] I crave the indulgence of my learned readers for the various shortcomings of the book. I tried my best and have put in all efforts to make it perfect. I fervently hope that the readers would find this humble work useful and interesting. (Dr M. A. Nayeem, External Relations of the Bijapur Kingdom. Hyderabad: Bright, 1974)

5. Scholarly expository prose Scholarly prose has for a long time been a special stronghold of Indian writing in English. However, native traditions of what is considered as appropriate for this style combine with a different argument structure and metaphorical expres­ sions to produce texts which do not match with western expectations. Consider Kandiah's (1981) text quoted in ch. 1 and the critical diction of V.P. Rao in his paper "The craftsmanship of R.K. Narayan" (in Mohan 1978:56-64): [...] Narayan truly evokes memories of the great Russian master, Chekhov. They are to me a marvellous re-affirmation of Narayan's (at) oneness with man; an orchestration of the merely human, inevitably rooted in the actual (58) [...] Muni in the story has had his halcyon days and is yet to die — we are going to witness him caught in that infernal suspension when living ends without death. Further there is the casual motorist; it is going to be a chance motorist that sets up ripples in the stagnant pond of Muni's life (59) [...] The last sentence breaks through the crust of the preceding lines even as their humanity does through their sub-human living (60) [...] The non-existent daughter thus adds a new dimension to Muni's poverty; he is not only poor in money and material possessions, he is also utterly poor — in progeny. This sort of freckles Muni's character, this old man, and he is insinuated fully into our sympathy. (61)

7 Text types and Indian English

201

Dasgupta (1993) describes "The otherness of English" in a style that reflects the otherness that it describes. Style and argument are thus in harmony, in a distinctively non-western kind — as in the unexpected analogy used to explain the functions of English in India: It may help if this relationship is clarified by means of an analogy. Consider the way a society employs metallurgy. The society as such is a life-pattern involving the days and nights of many individuals of various ages and sexes, etc. The practice of metallurgy, by a few adult males dedicated to that hard profession, involves a taming of the solar heat of high noon in the form of a furnace. This unvarying high noon is a stable adjunct, at a stable distance dif­ ferentiating its technicality from the cyclical and multiple ordinariness of the social life that employs this adjunct. Likewise, English the technical adjunct remains at a stable distance from, but faithfully serves, the general social life that employs it. The analogy does not appear to go very far. People stay away from the temperatures of a blast furnace, and keep the furnace at a safe distance from their homes, in order to protect their homes from a heat that would render them uninhabitable. Even if we postulate a corresponding fear of English as too 'hot' for our comfort, perhaps by invoking the McLuhan imagery of hot and cool, we have failed to explain what could possibly make this a stable distancing factor, for everyone knows that fears can disappear. (1993:202-3) 6. Advertisements of various types The development of a peculiar style of IndE advertising is closely connected (as it is elsewhere) with the history of the English press, thus having a tradition of well over a hundred years. The various kinds of advertising provide an excellent basis for a study of cultural and linguistic accommodation, as a consequence of a great number of factors all of which can be adapted to achieve the greatest appeal: 1) 2) 3)

7

the language used (English, indigenous, mixed); the style used (literary, playful, technical — giving varying weight to information or aesthetic appeal); typefaces used, lay-out and illustrations (if printed) or voice quality, accent, rhythm etc. (if spoken);7

My analysis is restricted to a few specimens from newspapers; it thus excludes other forms of written texts as displayed on posters and hoardings; written texts as shown and read out on tv; and spoken texts on radio, etc.

202

4)

7 Text types and Indian English

the correlation of the above features with the subclasses of advertisement, and the locale and audience, as enumerated in the model essay (from Chishty 1982:174): They may be private individuals who fill the advertisement columns with runon classifieds, offering to sell houses, cars, dogs or household effects; they may be employers seeking staff or eligible bachelors seeking brides; or manufacturers of goods advertising on a regional or national scale.

For my discussion, I would like to select the following subcategories: texts a) advertising goods (sarees, flats), b) offering services (self-praise of bank, etc.), c) film advertisements and d) matrimonials. a)

The advertisement for sarees shows an unusual clash of register: It is not only strange to find Keats quoted in this context (in other places Shakespeare, Milton, Wordsworth or Scott are used in similar functions), but also to see a highly poetical line juxtaposed to the technical tradename of Co-optex Polyester. The fusion of the romantic and technical continues in the miss-a-heart-beat passage, and ends in the bathos of the smart conquerors.

By contrast, the building advertisement is characterised by grammatical and stylistic errors: missing articles, pleonastic expressions and strange collocations are frequently suggestive of meaning rather than expressing it. However, it is likely that readers of this text will blame its unintelligibility on their own lack of competence rather than the writer's faulty grammar. Note the Indianism shifting in for 'moving in'.

7

Text types and Indian

203

English

VIKAS NAGAR OUR PRECIOUS GIFT ON EVE OF "NAVRATRI" FESTIVALS

!

READY POSSESSION

All of your doubts will totally vanish & your an­ xiety will end with glory. "VIKAS NAGAR" is now ready and only few flats are remaining to be sold ! Instant Possession against down Payment. Crystal clear dealings and undeterred sense of services is our only motto. ONE ROOM-HALL-KITCHEN. STURDY ECONOMIC F L A T S WITH MODERN AMENITIES. Many families have already settled in "VIKAS NAGAR" & many are just shifting in ! Visit "VIKAS NAGAR" & your mind will be full with satisfaction and realisation of truth. BUILDERS :

VIKAS

BUILDERS

Architects : NATVARLAL M. BARAI Solicitors: MAJMUDAR & SITE: ( OFFICE: Near Pump House Sc Agadi Nagar. Rajvamata Jijabai Road, Andhen (East), Bombay-400 Bus Route No. 339 Andheri (East) Station.

27B, Nehru Market. Kambliwadi, Vileparle (East), Bombay-400 057. 093. fromv

CO. J ! ¡ ' Í

SMALL, TINY AND ELEGANT MY OWN j HOME MEANS i

VIKAS NAGAR b)

j

The metaphors used to express the bank's "Seventy years of dedicated service" (pilgrims, flag) and the allegedly progressive policies of the firm, coached in formal or quasi-poetic diction (heretofore; tread the path, remove the tears of the down-trodden) impress Europeans as sadly out of tune, and certainly not conducive to evoke trust in the bank. However, the social history of banking in South Asia will easily explain the difference in the style used. The cultural unity of South Asia is indicated by a Pakistani bank advertising its services in a similar tune — the owners, of course, pledging themselves to the cause of Islam. The use of the quotation from Scott's Marmion for a Pakistani advertisement in favour of the exportimport traders matches the saree ad above.

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7 Text types and Indian English

ADVERTISING - PAKISTAN from: Γ Spelt, Annual Newsletter (1988)

And verily what is to come will be better for you than what has gone before. And verily God will grant you enough to make you happy. In these words addressed by God to the Prophet (peace be upon him) there is perpetual solace for all true believers. Let us bow our heads in gratitude to God for all His favours bestowed on us in the past, and let us take a vow that we would shape our lives so as to please Him and deserve greater divine favours in the years to come.

Theflagof co-operation they earned on their shoulders and' marched towards their goal. Their goal was nothing but lo emancipale the masses who are denied their legitimate rights heretofore. We too have joined thè march lo tread the path our pioneers have Wodden. A n d at our SEVENTIETH ANNIVERSARY we vow once aqain to remove the tears of the down-trodden by bringing about social and economic justice.

The foremost obligation resting w i t h us is to establish the Islamic way of life. It is gratifying to see it taking shape in Pakistan. NBP w o u l d be doing its utmost to make a success of the efforts being made.

National of Pakistar

Bank Serves

T H E M A H A R A S H T R A STATE CO-OPERATIVE B A N K L T D . NagindasMasterRd-.Exlen,Fort,Bombay,400023. PID-l-B/88

'Ό' What Tangled Webs We Weave..." ....that tie up industrialists, while importers runs free! 'When First We Practice To Deceive." (The quote is from Sir Walter Scott, Marmion)

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Film advertisements add a more modern component — and since most of the foreign films are imported from the U.S., also the linguistic com­ ponent of AmE. The contrast with other ads neatly illustrates that the in modern world English additions of new text types will be made in the variety that supplies the commodity. Whereas societies in former British colonies normally still accept St BrE as the norm for written formal uses, the language of pop songs, films, videos and some types of popular novels is increasingly American. This development occurs imperceptibly, the ESL users, correctly from their point of view, interpreting the coin­ cidence of stylistic (informal) and regional (American) varieties as — in their world — exclusively a matter of style and register. DECCÄN CHRoNYCLE, TUESDAY, lat OCTOBER, 1985 VIJAYADASAMI GREETINGS TO ALL NOW SHOWING HOUSE FULLS DASSERA GREETINGS TO ALL GRĂND REVIVĂL ON FRIDAY 25TH OCTOBER BRAND NEW PRINT Silver Jubilee surprise musical gift of I all time J Enjoy with hit songs once again. I Gori tere ang aung mein pyar ka ! 'tonfa tera bana hai jeevan mera I

Happy Dassera Greetings At: STRLING.

Sizzling Opening On Fri.-25-10-85! 3 'Shows: 3.30, 6.30, 9.30 p.m.

Ăn> action packed musical ¡smash hit with hit songs & ¡Dances in The most Colossal Blockbuster which eclipses all others. The True story of the Legendary Leader's Heroic struggle against MUSSOLINI'S Mechanised Might. It's. Fire & Fury of Total War. SO REAL... SO SHOCKING... SO THRILLING...

- HAPPY DÄSSERĂ GREETINGS ! TO ALL ¡A MIGHTY'MAMMOTH MOVIE NOW SHOWING 4 Shows: 1.45, 3.45, 6.45, 9.45 p.m.

THE SAGA OF REVENGE AND SEX..HAIR RAISING THRILLS, ' SPECTACLE; ROMANÇEJ FOR YOUR EYES J (Remember it's for "Adult" eyes) I Adv.Bkg. in full swing. Book now be¡tween 11 a.m. to 6 p.m. non-stop Happy Dasscra Greetings to All

GALA OPENING ON FRI. 25-10-85 Thundering powerful

I

action packed drama with

before such daring role of his life time.. Sensuous & sensitive love story with I titilatmg situations first time in the twin cities | The most sexiest film ever. shown

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Matrimonial advertisements, as has frequently been pointed out, represent an obvious case of a text type to which the English language was newly applied in an Indian context. All the text-specific determinants are, then, carried over from indigenous languages. NON-KOUSIKA groom qualified and well placed for a Vadama B.Sc. girl now employed in Reserve Bank, Bombay age 22 years good looking medium complexion, height 155 cms Ayilyam star fourth padam. Only daughter father in New York decent marriage. Box ... BROTHER Doctor, settled America, coming India November, invites proposals from Punjabi Arora Engineer, Medico for his beautiful, fair, convent educated, Honours Graduate, Secretarial qualified sister, 22, 160, eligible immigration, employed Delhi, drawing twelve thousands annually. Box ... NON-SINGHAL match for 20 years, 160 cms., slim, fair, beautiful, B.Sc. passed girl. Graceful marriage. Dowry greedy need not write. Box .... MAIR RAJPUT Babbar family, residing Amritsar desire decent highly educated and well placed match for most beautiful (white and milky), B.A., Teachress, having angelic features, height 162 cms., aged 23 years. No bars. Correspond Box .... WANTED CHARMING, CONVENT EDUCATED MATCH FOR HANDSOME AGARWAL BOY, 25 YEARS, 172CMS., CHEMICAL ENGINEER, OFFICER IN STATE BANK. ONLY FAMILY OF STATUS NEED COR­ RESPOND BOX ...

An analysis of the first 200 advertisements under "Brides" in The Hindustan Times Weekly for Sunday, September 7, 1980 illustrates the expectations of 'grooms': the texts start with WANTED or a MATCH FOR or a description of the girl desired, for (followed by a description of the man and his family) and advice on how to get in touch. The adjectives qualifying the bride are most telling: beautiful is clearly the preferred choice (78 times), followed by fair {-complexionled, 54 times), slim (50 times), homely (i.e. 'home-oriented', 45 times) and smart (21 times); education (convent-educated, 22 times, graduate, 33 times, post-graduate 11, educated 8) is frequently mentioned. By contrast, there are only 2-4 mentions of accomplished, attractive, qualified, sharp-featured, talented, virgin, well versed, white complexioned and a single occurrence each of cultured, foreign-qualified, good-featured, graceful, handsome, healthy, innocent, intelligent, lucky, professional, simple, sweet, sweetnatured and white and milky — the last being a variant of the (still) relatively frequent wheatish (complexion/ed), itself a specification of fair. The description of grooms concentrates on their jobs and incomes, and on their caste (possibly "caste no bar"); many grooms are handsome (but not nearly

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as often as brides are beautiful), far fewer are fair or smart and only one convent-educated. Some (Sikhs) are clean-shaven. Families are affluent, business, cultured, God-fearing, middle educated, (old and very) respectable, sophisticated, wealthy, well-connected, well-placed or well-settled8 Horoscopes and bio-data which are often claimed to be traditional features of the text type are very rarely mentioned. A diachronic analysis of the text type promises to yield interesting insights: is there a gradual disappearance of the request for bio-data? Are the ads becoming more similar for both sexes? Is the number of non-BrE items decreasing — or is it increasing? Moreover, is there a notable difference between metropolis and province, north and south? 7. Obituaries Death and the rituals connected with it are among the most culture-specific phenomena the world over, and are most characteristically affected in culturecontact, whether the impact is owing to religion (e.g. Christian faith and rites imported through missionaries), language and medium (e.g. written English becoming used for rites established in a non-European religion formerly expressed in an indigenous language, whether current or dead) or to other social influences, or various fusions of these factors. Even if all cultures agree in reserving a highly formal, and often fossilized, style for the occasion, there may be quite conspicuous differences between what is considered appropriate (including silence!), and conventional culture-bound text formulas may diverge quite notably. In what way is a death communicated to friends and relatives, and what is the (linguistically) appropriate reaction to the sad news? The newspaper obituary from The Indian Nation (9 Oct. 1979, here taken from Mehrotra fc.) mingles (non-Christian) religious aspects with a political résumé of J.P.'s achievements, using metaphors that appear to be particularly culture-bound: (a)

8

A MONUMENTAL MAN So, at last, Destiny has robbed us of J.P., our most precious possession. His death is not a tragedy but a calamity for the nation. An institution, not an individual, has passed away in the sad demise of J.P. In the welter of confusion prevailing in the country where shall we go now to seek advice? We are undone, orphaned and dwarfed.

Somewhat strangely, brides can be B.Sc. passed, convented, or merited, boys can be salaried and families five star status.

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7 Text types and Indian English Disgusted as he was with our ways, he has left us for ever. Months back he was about to leave us and join the company of immortals but on our prayer and supplication he agreed to stay with us for some time to guide our destiny. And with his demise, which came in sleep, the only lamp that was flickering in the all pervading darkness to protect freedom and democracy and to show the right path to the people is extinguished now. Public memory is proverbially short to take a comprehensive view of his six-decade long selfless service to the nation. Only the last chapter, the heroic struggle against the misrule of the Congress Party which crowned with success and later ended on a bitter note, is remembered and highlighted. But did he not take a leading part in the battle for independence? Long before many of us were born he had become a legendary figure for his courage and fortitude. The part he played in the dint India movement will be remembered with gratitude for all time to come. Socialism which later became the creed of all political parties likewise owes no small debt to J.P. He had drunk deep at the fountain of Marxism but had also come in close contact with Mahatma Gandhi. Combining the two with his analytical mind he had formed his own-ideology, the ideology of people's power. He succeeded in toppling the government but that was not an end in itself. The end was the development of the people's power. That still remains to be done. There is none to fill the void as J.P. was a monumental man. But his words and deeds are there to inspire and elevate us. The best tribute to J.P. is to fulfil the task he has left unfinished. May his soul rest in peace and may God give us strength to bear this loss. (The Indian Nation, October 9, 1979)

(b)

UTHALA OUR DEAR SARITA EXPIRED ON 5-9-80. Uthala will take place at 5 P.M. ON 8-9-80 AT F-6, ASHOK VIHAR (PHASE 1), DELHI52./N.N., ADVOCATE, (HUSBAND)/ N.N., A.C.P., (FATHER)/N.N., ADVOCATE, (FATHER-IN-LAW).

(c)

KIRYA With profound grief we inform the sudden and untimely demise of our beloved SANJAY on 4th Sept. 1980. The Kirya Ceremony will take place on Sunday the 7th Sept. 1980 between 3 to 5 P.M. at G-5/1-2. Malviya Nagar, New Delhi-17./N.N.(Father)/N.N. (G. Father)/N.N. & N.N. (Uncles)/N.N. (G. Father Mat.)

(d)

OBITUARY WE REGRET TO INFORM ABOUT THE SAD DEMISE OF OUR J.N. SHARMA ON 4TH SEPTEMBER, 80. HAVAN & SHANTIPATH WILL BE PERFORMED ON SUNDAY THE 7TH SEPTEMBER, 1980 AT B-56, SOUTH EXTENSION H, NEW DELHI, BETWEEN 5 TO 6 P.M./N.N. FATHER/N.N. MOTHER/N.N. BROTHER/N.N. BROTHER/N.N. SISTER/ N.N. SON-IN-LAW/N.N. SISTER/N.N. SON-IN-LAW/& ALL RELATIVES.

The three short obituaries sound somewhat archaic in their use of expire and demise (but there is no instance here of the formula "went to his heavenly abode"); uthala, kirya, and havan & shantipath ceremonies mentioned provide clues as to the religious denominations involved, but there is nothing particular in the structure of the notices.

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8. Letters and essays Letters and essays provide two essential advantages for an analysis of the degree of indigenization of a second language: 1)

They represent the text type in which users are most likely to be actively involved: whereas a newspaper article or a poem is only read, or a news broadcast only listened to, a letter (less so, an essay) is both written and read by an ESL user whose competence may be limited; also, the texts concerned are often culturally and situationally highly bound.

2)

Manuals of letter-writing and composition permit one to compare the (printed) input, which normally presents a prescriptive model, and the learners' output. (Since no extensive corpora are available, I will here analyse the models only; it would be ideal to have at one's disposal, for example, a set of essays written on a specific topic by a class of university students).

Chishty et al. provide advice on good style in various types of text. As regards letters they offer the following two as specimens for official complaints: (a)

A letter on uncleanliness of your area (Chishty no. 15) To The Chief Health Officer, Lahore Municipal Corporation, Lahore

Street No. 18, Ramagar, Lahore, 8th August, 1952

Sir, I want to bring to your kind notice a very serious practice which is indulged in by the sweepers of our area. Ours is a small street but it is always littered with rubbish and there are huge collections of foul smelling garbage. Everybody is out to deposit the rubbish and refuse here because it is a back street and escapes the notice of the Corporation functionaries. The state of affairs prevalent in our street is not only a nuisance and an irritant but also a great health hazard. These dumps serve as ideal breeding places for flies, mosquitoes and other harmful germs. To top it all the atmosphere is being polluted constantly. In the circumstances if an epidemic breaks out in the not too distant future that will be only natural. For some inexplicable reason the lane has never been swept by the Corporation sweepers and the heaps of rubbish are removed by the Corporation only off and on. Some residents have engaged private sweepers, but the task, which is Herculean in proportions, is beyond them. It is requested that rubbish bins may be constructed for the use of the residents and the Corporation sweepers may be instructed to sweep our street regularly. Yours, faithfully, Anwar Anjum. (1982:83-4)

210 (b)

7 Text types and Indian English A letter pleading the elimination of tongas (Chisty no. 17) To The Mayor, Lahore Municipal Corporation, Lahore. Sir, I really feel elated that the city fathers have decided to eliminate tongas from Lahore under a phased programme spread over five years. It is a news for which people have been waiting for years. The number of tongas, rehras and carts plying on the roads of this great city lawfully and unlawfully is really awe-inspiring: twelve thousand! Then why complain of traffic con­ gestions and deplorable sanitary conditions! The filth and refuse deposited by horses and bullocks on the road is quite nasty, it emits obnoxious smell and presents an ugly look. This refuse generally remains lying on roads for days because the Corporation cannot hire a horde of sweepers to remove it. When it dries up it flies up in the air, spoils the clothes of pedestrians and cyclists, their faces and eyes are also not immune from it. These animal-driven vehicles donot abide by traffic rules. Traffic cops are helpless before them. You will often see that a car or a bus is about to pass a rehra, but cannot succeed. The rehra driver suddenly raises his arm and begins to turn about. The tonga driver is no better. If he is ahead of you, the honking will have no effect on him; he will move only at leisurely pace. At the crossings he pays no attention to the traffic lights and passes on merrily even though the red light is blazing in his face. I feel that a period of five years for their total elimination is too long; they can be got rid of in a much shorter time. Man is a devious creature by nature. The tonga owners are also very cunning people. They are incorrigible, too. They will certainly hit out ways in the next five years to defeat the pious intentions of city fathers. They should be given no quarter and be made to stop their trade in a much shorter period. But before that the drivers of tongas and rehras must be provided with alternative means of livelihood, otherwise the whole exercise will boomerang. Yours sincerely, Mohammad Mohsin.

For more personal concerns the style proposed becomes even more uneven; this does not come as a surprise, the colloquial register being largely missing in traditional written IndE (unless the gap is filled by new models, as is the case with film advertisements (cf. 5c)). I here quote a specimen letter from Lal (n.d., quoted from Görlach 1989a: 135-7):9

9

The guide book was the most popular (and inexpensive) on display in a bookshop in Rawal­ pindi in 1989. Its price makes it accessible to all who are eager for guidance on style, and the fact that it was imported from India underlines the cultural connections that still exist between India and Pakistan. Schoolbooks, letter-writing manuals and newspapers can be taken to be the most influential sources for 'lowbrow' IndE.

7 Text types and Indian English (c)

Letter to a pen friend

New Delhi, Date ...

My dear Manohar, Your letters of the 15th, 16th and 18th are before me and Oh, you beat me. I mean you have overwhelmed me with your charm, manners and gallantry of heart. Above all you like my snaps too. It is a great pleasure to me. Thanks a lot. And you are so over burdened with work could I come help you with some of it — without (trust me) a word of folly between us. What I will not give, O Manohar, to be near you — a source of incessant delight. Then isn't friendship really a beloved state and a beloved theme on which many a poet has thrown his web of enchanting lyricism — or songwriter ridden far into its melodious depths. The quote one. "A wholly platonic friendship. You said I had proved to you Could bend a man and a woman The whole season through. With never a thought of fitting Though both were in their youth. We touched on a thousand subjects The moon and the worlds above. And our talk was tincture science And everything else save love And yet there was not a word of folly Spoken between us two. For here was only a pleasant friendship To bind us and nothing more." So said Ella, naughty Ella Wilcox, but surely she knew what she was talking about. So we are pals. Are not we? Now that our pen friendship is here — it is for us to cross its uncharted seas and many delightful surprises await us, if only we follow our guiding influence of the compass that points to safe always. You Grand Manohar, by and by I will impress on you that I appreciate fine things in life and nature. Yesterday there was a stir in the heart of the city. Some famous wrestlers of Bangalore visited the place prior to their show. They were doing some shopping. It seems there was the unusual crowd following these manmountains, though many of the gentler sex were scared of them. Then there was a wrestling show in the evening. It drew a huge crowd even a consider­ able number of the fair sex were there to see those man-mountains tearing each other, ripping open their sockets, and breaking joints — ooo — could they be sadistics? I have never liked a wrestling bout. It unnerves me. What do you say? Instead I went to a movie — I saw Sister Carrie. It was taken from the book by Theodore Driesser. It was a bit naughty, yet so touching and so humane. It is the story of a man well placed in society honoured by all — who gives

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up his family, his status, everything for a young girl who has suddenly came into his life. This he calls love and the state of affairs only ruins him. He dies as a forsaken man. Could and all love be like this "Manohar or it is only a thwarted love." If love is beautiful, inspiring and revitalising how could this happen? This week is a hard one for me. Have many pending cases that need immediate attention, I have been trying to write and finish this letter since 8.10 a.m., here in the office. The other colleagues are busy elsewhere. If the T.M. should tell me to do a fresh case I will have to get up with a mind curse, perhaps on my lips. So dear Manohar, do write soon to me. You letters are cups of brimming wine in which my soul gets immersed from time to time and to be deprived of them, would be to be denied the thing I cherish most on this earth. From now on I will be writing to you regularly. I will not prolong this letter for it may be getting stale. So I will stop it wishing you all the best, you in my thoughts and your sweet name on my lips. Yours ever loving Jane.

Essay-writing is another skill much appreciated around the world.10 Chishty et al. find that students in Lahore "mostly fight shy of writing an essay. In fact, they find the whole business utterly irksome" (1982:141). Their ideas about "dispelling doubts and allaying ill-founded fears" are very traditional, explaining many of the resulting peculiarities. They explicitly advise: A habit of reading good literature is a great aid in writing. It must be culti­ vated, for its educational gain is immeasurable. Ideas regained from fast read­ ing lend charm to an essay and make the whole exercise worthwhile

— exemplifying in their own style the dangers (and, as they believe, beauties) of such models. The guidebook on English composition was published in Lahore in 1982. Although meant for Urdu-speaking students, the difference between Urdu and the native Hindi of northern Indians is small and the difference in the degree of competence in English negligible, so that the textbook may here represent the type for a pan-South-Asian tradition. The excerpts here chosen come from a variety of general topics on which students are expected to be knowledgeable enough to write an essay in their best style. Each section is introduced by a list of preliminary headings (cf. text e) below) intended to help students to gather their thoughts (in the good old tradition of classical inventio). The style keynote here sounded (identical for all 10 For two essays on the "dowry system" which display characteristic features of IndE see Y. Kachru (1995:22f., with helpful interpretation).

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the topics) makes it impossible for the writers to break free from the pattern — should they feel tempted to do so. The texts exhibit various forms of ESL, and more specifically South Asian/Pakistani features: local words, whether loanwords (hookah, pan, challan) or coinages (overspeeding); register misuse/style mixture which includes unusual collocations; poetical quotations, strained metaphors and allusions to classical antiquity — not all of which can be illustrated from the one text here selected. Specimen essay:

ROAD ACCIDENTS

Some suggestions: (i) (ii) (iii) (iv) (v) (vi)

Training of drivers and improvement in their service conditions. Inculcation of traffic sense in the general public. Exercise of care in issuing driving licences and certificates of road worthiness of commercial vehicles, Rational system of route permits, Widening and improvement of roads, Separation of traffic police from the general police.

The Essay: 'An accident is something that happens unexpectedly to hurt a person." If you hit somebody and he hits you back and hurts you, that is not an accident because you should have expected it. But if you climb a ladder, and the ladder somehow slips or gives way, and with that you, too, fall down and hurt yourself, that is an accident because you did not expect it, otherwise you would not have climbed up it. Every year millions of people fall a prey to accidents. In the United States alone nearly 115,000 persons are killed and almost a hundred times of that are hurt in accidents every year. The biggest number of those who are killed about 55,000, die in road accidents of one kind or another. In Pakistan, though no authentic figures are available because we do not believe in authenticity otherwise we would have devised a foolproof system of collecting them, the situation is not very different; on closer examination we will find it even grimmer. The number of accidents that are daily reported in the Press or on the T.V. and radio, is enough to convince you that our roads have become veritable death traps for us. When we venture to step out of our homes or places of work on the roads we are not sure whether we will be able to reach our destination safely or not. There are numerous causes of road accidents. Some of them are: 1. 2. 3. 4.

Narrowness and deplorable condition of roads. Negligence and incompetence of drivers. Love for overspeeding. Lack of proper care in issuing driving licences and certificates of road worthiness of commercial vehicles.

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9. Cookery recipes India appears to be untypical among ESL societies in having the text type cookery book/recipe in local forms, and having it in locally marked English: other former colonies, by contrast, hae only imported cookery books or those written by expatriates. The two locally written and printed books here analysed clearly show that their type is a European transplant: the structure of the individual recipe is identical with the British pattern, so whatever deviance there is lies in a) b)

the dishes described, and the local ingredients which normally have indigenous, non-English names; some grammatical features, most also found in other text types: 'partitive' of in measurements is often omitted (as often in BrE), the use of articles is variable, and there are quite a few unusual collocations.

(a)

Alu halwa 125 grams potatoes, boiled, peeled and mashed to a paste. 125 grams powdered sugar. 75 grams ghee. 1 tsp. ground cardamom seeds. Handful of finely sliced almonds and pistachios. 1 tblsp. fried raisins and charoli. A few drops essence of rose or kewda. Silver or gold foil. Heat ghee and put in potatoes, sugar and cardamoms. Keep on stirring till the mixture turns golden in colour. Mix in nuts, raisins and essence and remove from fire. Serve immediately covered with foil.

(b)

Sweet potato kheer 3 big sweet potatoes, boiled, peeled and mashed. 1 1/2 litre milk. 1 tsp. ground cardamom seeds. 4 tblsps. ground sugar. Handful of finely sliced almonds and pistachios. 1 tblsp. fried raisins. 4 to 5 dates, pitted and sliced finely. Blend together sugar and milk and place on a low fire. Stir frequently until the milk is reduced to half the quantity. Put in cardamoms and sweet potatoes and keep on stirring until the mixture turns thick. Remove from fire and garnish with nuts, raisins and dates and serve either hot or cold, (from Reejhsinghani 1978)

10. The language of literature The topic is far too wide to permit any kind of adequate or even suggestive treatment, so a few remarks must suffice. The following major problems of an ESL literature force themselves on the observer:11 11

For one of the numerous discussions of the predicament of an ESL author writing for both an ESL and ENL audience in a multilingual state compare Iyengar (1973:8-9):

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1)

2) 3) 4)

5)

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Is the foreign literary tradition to be transplanted wholesale, together with the language, leaving nothing local except the themes, thus producing the proverbial "Mathew Arnold in a sari," or should non-English topics, styles and traditions be retained, the foreign language being relentlessly adapted? If the language chosen is English, then what kind of English — to what extent are local non-standard forms to be admitted, and in what genres? What audience is addressed — an Indian or an international one (the latter often indicated by a London publishing house)? What literary or stylistic traditions is the writer to follow? The extreme forms are likely to be equally unacceptable, whether British styles are grafted on to Indian themes or Indian linguistic/stylistic conventions simply relexified into English. How neutral must the ESL writer's style be in order to be correct and how can he avoid producing anaemic and unexciting texts? How experi­ mental, on the other hand, can an ESL writer be without being charged with butchering the Queen's English?

There is a stifling tradition of IndE writing which is characterized by the whole­ sale takeover of specific BrE genres and their appropriate styles. This was most prominent in the 19th century. Iyengar (1973:37) quotes from Kashiprosad Ghose's poem "The Moon in September", written in 1830: How like the breath of love the rustling breeze Is breathing through the fragrant Sandal trees! How sad but sweet the Bulbul sings above [...] Like liquid silver yon soft-gliding stream Wanders and glistens in the lunar beam [...]

The Indian writer in English has necessarily to keep in mind a scattered national audience, and what his language lacks in vigorous local idiom and the nuances of regional sentiment and emotion has to be made up in spatial extension and wide human appeal. 'National identity' is a spiralling concept, ranging from the material to the spiritual. Geographical unity, racial inter­ mingling over a large stretch of time, common memories of the past, a broad pattern of beliefs and customs all over the country, a common urge to move towards the new horizons of the future, all have been there — however much the political fog may have obscured them. But the sap that keeps all this alive is verily, in Sri Aurobindo's words, 'the vision of the Mother, the perpetual contemplation, adoration and service of the Mother.' — a passage that neatly illustrates in its diction the possibilities and dangers of a transplanted English (cf. the quotation from Rao, below).

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While such writing is typical of the early phases of an imitative literature, and was rightly criticised (or made fun of) in the 19th century, there are warnings, even down to the present day, against such sterile writing — which is frequently outdated in the 'mother land' by the time it is imitated in the 'colonies'. One of the most-quoted statements in support of stylistic independence is by Raja Rao, who said in his famous Kanthapura (1938:9-10): The telling has not been easy. One has to convey in a language that is not one's own the spirit that is one's own. One has to convey the various shades and omissions of a certain thought-movement that looks maltreated in an alien language. I used the word 'alien', yet English is not really an alien language to us. It is the language of our own intellectual make-up. We are all instinc­ tively bilingual, many of us writing in our own language and in English. We should not, we cannot write only as Indians. We have grown to look at the large world as part of us. Our method of expression has to be as distinctive and colourful as the Irish and American. Time alone will justify it. (quoted from Labru 1984:24) The 1959 Kavita Manifesto specified as its first points: 1. We affirm our faith in a vital language as sufficient to write poetry in. A vital language may be in modern idiom or 'ancient' but it must not be a total travesty of the current pattern of speech. We consider all expressions like 'the sunlight sweet', 'deep booming voice' and 'fragrant flowers upon the distant lea' to be ridiculous. King's and Queen's English, yes; Indian English per­ missible; pidgin, bombastic and gluey English, no. 2. We think that poetry must deal in concrete terms with concrete experience. That experience may be intellectual or emotional or historical-tragical-pastoralcomical, but it must be precise, and lucidly and tangibly expressed. It is better to suggest a sky by referring to a circling eagle in it than to say simply 'the wide and open sky'. [...] 3. We claim that the phase of Indo-Anglian romanticism ended with Sarojini Naidu and 'I bring for you aglint with dew a little lovely dream'. Now, waking up, we must more and more aim at a realistic poetry reflecting poetically and pleasingly the din and hubbub, the confusion and indecision, the flashes of beauty and goodness of our age, and leave the fireflies to dance through the neem. (quoted from Nandy 1973:13-14) As in other fields of non-native writing (e.g. in neo-Latin literature) it is probably easier for an Indian to write a good poem than to write good prose, where there may be a greater danger of being imitative, with a veneer of local colour or flavour. If an Indian writer breaks away from traditional patterns, he is as removed in his experimental forms and diction from his IndE as an Englishman would be from his everyday BrE. It is then difficult to say in what

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way the text type is nativized, except, of course, as regards the contents in the wider sense. Compare Adil Jussawalla's "Sea breeze, Bombay" (Nandy, p. 35): SEA BREEZE, BOMBAY Partition's people stitched Shrouds from a flag, gentlemen scissored Sind. An opened people, fraying across the cut Country, reknotted themselves on this island. Surrogate city of banks, Brokering and bays, refugees' harbour and port, Gatherer of ends whose brick beginnings work Loose like a skin, blotching the coast, Restore us to fire. New refugees, Wearing blood-red wool in the worst heat, Come from Tibet, scanning the sea from the north, Dazed, holes in their cracked feet. Restore us to fire. Still, Communities tear and re-form; and still a breeze, Cooling our garrulous evenings, investigates nothing, Ruffles no tempers, uncovers no root. And settles no one adrift of the mainland's histories. To permit judgement of the quality of an adaptation of English to Indian situations, it is probably more useful to quote a few passages from a best-selling novel, less ambitious formally and linguistically than classics by writers like Khushwant Singh, Raja Rao or Anand. I have here chosen Bhattacharya's Music for Mohini (1952) about a "suave, city-bred and an upcoming music star [...] in a new rural setting", as the blurb has it, which also describes the author as "a front-ranking Indo-Anglian novelist and author." The following two passages are linguistically somewhat un-British — without, apparently, being translated from an indigenous language: [...] She pulled his snub nose. "Tongue clever! Am I not your elder? Bad enough that you so often call me Mohini and not Didi, Elder Sister." She swept back a loop of hair, damping her brow. "You should knock your head on my feet at every sun-up and beg my blessing." (9) The firewagon rocked with speed, seated in a corner, Jayadev was sunk in a book. He had no eye for the other passengers, no ear for their chatter. He was a silent solitary man with heavy-lidded dreamy eyes in a young tranquil face. Marriage had stirred a whirlpool in the stream of his feelings, and he was anxious to smooth the disturbance and be his true self again. [...] It was his mother's will which had led him into marriage, even though at this vital hour, every conscious thought and feeling was to have been dedicated, yoked, to the great task at hand. It was his dream to reorientate the values and patterns of

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7 Text types and Indian English Hindu life [...]. While others borrowed a ready-made sword from Western ideology to cut the knots of the problem, Jayadev delved back into India's remote past for a solution. (67)

Literary parodies are dubious linguistic evidence (cf. Görlach 1983); however, if they are interpreted very cautiously, they can draw attention to stereotypical features which are perceived as distinctive for a language by both external observers and — possibly — the speakers themselves. The history of colonial Englishes is full of such parodying accounts, which range from Anstey's "Baboo Jabberjee, B.A." to Ch.G. Leland's racy poems of 1876 in largely unauthentic Chinese Pidgin English — which provided the commonly accepted stereotype of the variety. (How wide of the mark linguistically such fabrications can be, and still be considered very funny, is shown by A. Coren'v "Idi Amin" columns of the 1970s, which were not in AfE but in a kind of Caribbean creole.) One of the best-known modern parodies is R. Parthasarathy's "What is your good name, please" which makes fun of almost all the features in which IndE deviates from the proclaimed British model, such as (apart from the localising function of names): 1) 2) 3) 4) 5) 6) 7)

tense and aspect confusion; irregular use of articles; invariable tags {isn't it? no?); questions marked by intonation only; pleonastic uses (headache pain, discussing about) local idioms (inter-caste, matric fail, foreign-returned, put up) and wrong uses of BrE idioms (make the two ends meet): erudite diction (eschew, opine, purchase). What is Your Good Name, Please? What is your good name, please? I am remembering we used to be neighbours in Hindu Colony ten fifteen years before. Never mind. What do you know? You are in service, isn't it? I am Matric fail. Self-employed. Only last year I celebrated my marriage. It was inter-caste. Now I am not able to make the two ends meet. Cost of living is going up and up everyday. Sugar, for example, is costing much. I am eschewing sugar therefore since last two months. Also I am diabetes. It is good, no? Excuse me, please, where are you putting up?

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Never mind, you will be coming to my place one day surely, I am hoping. Not to disappoint. You are Madrasi, no? How I make out? All Madrasis talking English language wonderfully. I am knowing intimately one Srijut Dandayudhapani from Brahmanwada. He is foreign-returned from U.K. Pronounciation is A1, I am telling you. Some people are lucky. He is officer in State Bank, Drawing Rs. 2.000. We are always discussing about politics. Congress government I am saying is still best for delivering goods. What you opine? Beg pardon, I am going. I am forgetting to go to Gandhi Market for purchasing the Aspro Since today morning I am suffering from headache pain. I am taking your leave, yes, for the time.

It is interesting to compare Nissim Ezekiel's "Very Indian poem in Indian English" which makes use of the same set of stereotypical features, thus illus­ trating the strong hold these preconceptions have — features which are in fact very rare in 'normal' Indian texts, as is documented by their virtual absence from the Kolhapur corpus (Schmied p.c.). 10. Conclusion The analysis of a much greater corpus of texts will be necessary to show how much variation there is in the individual text types here described and how characteristic highly nativized texts are of Indian writing in English as a whole. Besides, a diachronic investigation of texts within their genres could show whether a trend away from IntE, which is so noticeable in pronunciation, is also found in writing, as a consequence of the considerable reduction in ELT by native speakers and — possibly — a growing willingness to accept local usages as part of a national (or South Asian?) norm. Again, such trends should ideally show up in a statistical analysis of large corpora from different periods.

SOCIOLINGUISTIC DETERMINANTS FOR LITERATURE IN DIALECTS AND MINORITY LANGUAGES: MAX AND MORITZ IN SCOTS

1. Introduction1 1.1. The text and its authors The year 1990 was the 125th anniversary of two of the world's most famous children's books, Alice in Wonderland and Max and Moritz. Quite apart from the fact that the two are choices likely to come to the mind of a speaker of English or German asked to name a children's classic, the two books share a great number of similarities: their authors, Lewis Carroll and Wilhelm Busch, were born in the same year, 1832, both were bachelors, both were typical intellectuals of their age and neither was ever to repeat the success of the book that made his name. However, there are differences, too: whereas Carroll was very interested in translations of Alice, carefully selecting translators that he expected would do a proper job, Busch appears not to have cared very much — we do not even know whether he was aware of any translations of his masterpiece. Also, the history of Alice in Wonderland and Max and Moritz translations, and the influence they have had on foreign readers, are quite different. There must be some 600-800 translations of Alice; these include quite a number of versions in African or Asian languages, but (as far as I am aware) there is not a single translation of it into an English, Scots or German dialect. By contrast, Max and Moritz has remained a very 'European' book2 — the only 'exotic' versions worth noticing are five Japanese and five Hebrew ones. On the other hand, there is a striking number of translations into smaller languages and 1 The present article is combined from Görlach (1990f and 1992b); I have here greatly reduced data drawn from German dialect translation. The article complements my earlier papers dis­ cussing problems of translation into English-related pidgin and creole languages (Görlach 1986c) and into older forms of English (Görlach 1986b). 2

As regards popularity, it has — in spite of many translations into European languages — remained a very 'German' book.

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dialects, mostly from the fringe of the German-speaking area: four versions in Frisian dialects and eight in various regional forms of Romansh/Ladin (cf. Görlach 1990c) testify to the desire to provide reading material for children who might otherwise be swamped by the German language of books, radio and television. There have also been translations into German dialects and related languages from quite early on: a Swiss German version in 1938, one into Penn­ sylvania Dutch in 1942, Low German in 1951 — and two into Yiddish in 1920 and 1921. From 1980 onwards the count becomes biased by the fact that some 60-70 translations of Max and Moritz were prompted by me (and many of these edited in collections in due course, cf. Görlach 1982a, 1982b, 1986a, 1990b, 1994f, 1995c); these include over sixty versions in German dialects — and five in different forms of Scots, the 'data' for my paper. The versions here compared (all in Görlach 1986a) are: G L A S (X)

(Glaswegian) (Lallans/Standard Scots) (Aberdeenshire/NE) (Shetlandic) (Middle Scots)

Matt an Malkie by Steve Mulrine Dod and Davie by J.K. Annand Mac and Matthy by J.D. McClure Jarm an Jeemsie by Derick Herning Mak and Moreis by H.H. Meier

As far as I am aware, the four translations form the most extensive corpus to date of parallel translations into modern Scots, and what is more, all four were made independently of each other — the translators had no opportunity of com­ paring their texts and saw the other versions only when the book had appeared. (It is interesting to see that in a very few cases all four arrived at the same solution, as in 11. 347-8, when all used the Scots rhyme pair faa (fall): craw). 1.2. Standard language and dialect It will be useful to begin by reflecting on how early and how strictly the language of literature became linked with the standard. For England, this idea was first explicitly expressed four hundred years ago by Puttenham (1589:120), who prescribed London English because it was courtly, used by the educated and most widely understood.3 If a writer chose to use dialect, he might come under attack from those who believed that it was the author's responsibility to stabilize the standard language by using it. In Germany similarly critical attitudes emerged in the Classical period; this was Schiller's reaction in 1805 to 3 For a survey of attitudes relating to English dialects and to the use of non-standard language in literature cf. Görlach (1988c) and Blake (1981).

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Hebel (finding his poetry charming but being put off by his dialect) and Keller's in 1875 to Reuter: he regarded it "as somewhat barbaric if the common national language is frequently deserted and the author branches out in various direc­ tions" (both statements summarized from Haas 1983:1639; for a survey of attitudes, Socin 1888 is still indispensable). Of course, such attitudes are only part of a much wider sociolinguistic history. The history of standard languages in Western Europe from 1500 onwards, and the complementary development of dialects, has been similar from nation to nation (Ammon et al. 1988). Although the spread of a national standard took place at different speeds geographically and socially, its implementation in­ variably affected the evaluation of dialect as a non-standard form of speech, that is as the stigmatised patois of the less educated unable to use the standard language — for if they were able to do so, they would. A simplified account of such a development might show the process as normally happening in up to five stages: 1)

The pre-standard time when dialects served exclusively for spoken and written use.

2)

The period of the emerging standard, with norms spreading first in the written form, and often supported by book printing, by Biblical translation and preaching, by court language and chanceries, and by the schools; this period is often characterized by extremely negative attitudes towards dialect, a form of speech that appears to threaten the standard, or at least pollute it; note that there is often no distinction made between dialects and (genetically related) minority languages, a difference that is difficult for linguists and well below the level of awareness of the speakers.

3)

A new interest in dialects from the Romantic age onwards, taken by lin­ guists, folklore students and poets; such positive re-evaluation — sparked off by Scottish fears of loss of identity after the Union in 1707 — is first seen in 18th-century Scotland (as a reaction against English dominance), with Germany lagging behind (Herder, Hebel, Groth), and with the culti­ vation of minority languages being severely impaired in France by the equality concept of the French Revolution, which was interpreted as a necessity to demand St French for all;4 and by nationalistic pressures towards assimilation elsewhere.

4

It is interesting to see that as recently as May 1990, among various nations in modern Europe, France and Greece objected to discussing the problems of minorities because it was claimed there weren't any in the two countries.

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4)

The increasing loss of dialect in modern Europe as the normal every-day medium of communication in the towns, and then in rural communities, as a consequence of industrialization, urbanization, general education and mass media. It is significant that primary school teachers have, until quite recently, seen one of the greatest problems for beginners in their lack of the standard language. In Germany, a series of books was published a few years ago (Besch 1976-78) which provided linguistic analyses contrasting one regional dialect with Schriftdeutsch and offered teaching aids based on predictable difficulties. Sales of these books have decreased dramati­ cally, and no new volumes been published — because most of the dif­ ficulties have disappeared as a result of the children's much earlier acquisition of the standard language. That this is a common European phenomenon is illustrated by contributions to Ammon et al. (1989): investigations of the dialect competence of Danish speakers, for instance, showed that classical dialects have more or less disappeared (22), though possibly surviving a little better in remote Bornholm (23).

5)

The cultivation of dialects or minority languages for restricted functions (such as poetry) with a nostalgic tinge and often connected with preser­ vative aims to stabilize or save what is being lost and is often still current only among older speakers, sometimes bordering on attempts at dialect revival or historical documentation of a dying speech form.

6)

The complex history sketched in 1) to 5) above is even more complicated when regional Umgangssprachelmodified standard or national standards (Scottish, Irish or American English; Austrian or Swiss German as written languages) are included. While my discussion is exclusively on the dialect end of the continuum, it should not be overlooked that 'regionalism' in the 20th century is largely based on accent in speech, and idiomatic markers in writing, rather than on traditional dialect (cf. various articles in Coulmas 1990).

The scheme above is not invariable; it depends on a continuous decline in the prestige and the functional range of the dialect. If such loss of vitality occurs, a point will be reached where stabilization (not to mention re-establishment) of the former range of functions and frequency of use will become impossible — because its speakers are not sufficiently motivated to pass on the language to their children. It is a widespread error to believe that official support (including presence in the media and subsidized publications) and a certain expansion of text types are an antidote to such erosion. This appears to be Kloss's (21980) error when he states that the writing of expository prose is a precondition for a

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full language. Note that Modern Ivrit is the only success story among attempted revivals. However, there have been, in a second (post-Renaissance) wave of linguistic nationalism, a number of success stories of language standardization which made speech forms formerly regarded as dialects of major languages independent, or at least gave them accepted written standards, as happened for Slovak, Maltese, Baltic languages, Modern Greek (cf. Haarmann 1988), but contrast the failure of others (cf. Meijering 1973). Moreover, unexpected reversals in the decline of dialects are recorded: while it seemed likely, in the 19th century, that Swiss German dialects (and possibly Letzebuergsch) would go the way of all German dialects, i.e. become increas­ ingly discredited, restricted in functions and eroded by the omnipresent 'High' language, there has been a remarkable increase in their prestige and consequent stabilization and differentiation (Löffler 1986, Haas 1988). As will be shown in the discussion of lexis below, it is in fact possible to identify dialects belonging to the formerly separate language Low German on the one hand, and those — whatever their historical status in earlier centuries — which are more appropri­ ately classified as independent languages today: in the case of Yiddish, this has long been recognized, Letzebuergsch was declared the national language of Luxemburg ten years ago, and Cimbrian (cf. Wurzer 1983, Kloss 21980:140-5) should possibly be ranked on the same level — but not, for instance, Transsylvanian German in Rumania or Pennsylvania Dutch. It is possibly no coincidence that minority languages genetically related to the national standard language have had a more difficult stand than unrelated ones: thus it could be argued that Scots was and is in a more precarious position than Gaelic, Low German than Sorbían, Occitan (possibly) than Breton, Galician than Basque, Friulian than Slovene. Whereas unrelated languages can be looked down upon as uncivilised, clumsy, low and of little use, they cannot be considered debased, corrupt, maltreated varieties of the national languages — as related minority languages often have been and still are. (Note the counter-examples in the cases of Slovak and Catalan). It must also be stressed that there is not just one form of Scots, North Frisian, Low German, Swiss German, or Romansh: these designations refer to groups of interrelated dialects. The absence of a stan­ dard form restricts their intelligibility and acceptability and further weakens their position — at least in written use. 1.3. Text types and uses of dialect Ever since the Renaissance, the uses of dialect have been defined according to the requirements of decorum, at least for the major European languages.

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However, the range of functions and acceptable genres differ considerably, as do the definitions of what is considered an appropriate regional character for the language used. Where written language is concerned, certain text types are associated with dialect — not that such texts must necessarily be in dialect, but it is admitted that they may be: most of these types contain 'informality' and 'humour' among their components: almanac anecdote comic strip commercial advertisement dialogue in novels fairy tale joke life story

ballad burlesque Büttenrede folksong occasional poems (births, weddings) popular drama satire street ballad

It is significant that whereas birth and marriage notices in dialect are frequent (for instance in Cologne newspapers), death notices are very rare, the medium not being considered appropriate for the formality of the occasion.5 Summarizing the uses of German dialects in the media, Straßner (1983) arrives at somewhat critical or pessimistic statements: dialect in newspapers is rare; where it occurs, it serves almost exclusively nostalgic-conservative func­ tions — the question arises whether it deserves the part it still plays (1514). Radio is organized on a regional basis, but standard German is the rule. Pro­ gramme directors appear to give some room to dialect where subjective, emotional or private domains are concerned (1519). In advertising, dialect is very rare, even if some quasi-dialect was seen as effective in the course of the 'dialect wave' of the 1970s (1523). Different, of course, is the experimental use of dialect where authors deliber­ ately flout sociolinguistic conventions to write texts whose form and content make one expect standard language. Different, again, are the deliberate attempts at language planning on behalf of dialects by expansion of their domains, and in consequence, their lexis and syntactical patterns.

5

Note the fact that although Letzebuergsch is rare in newspapers such as the Luxemburger Wort, it is used for both birth or marriage announcements and for death notices or in memoriams. Only a more comprehensive comparison of various text types can indicate whether this has to do with the greater degree of 'language-ness' of Letzebuergsch.

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All these considerations are important because they provide hints as to the purpose of dialect writings and their acceptance by readers. Such acceptance is of course determined not just by the correlation of dialect with individual text types but by more general attitudes. Investigations of what speakers think about their dialects are therefore important to help explain successes and failures of writing in dialect. Werlen (1984) reports on responses to questionnaires in which dialect was tested for its characteristics. Some evaluations are probably similar all over Western Europe (dialect is plain, less orderly, less intelligible, less modern and less sophisticated, but more genuine). However, it must be striking to, say, Englishmen that speakers of German dialects considered their vernaculars as expressive, necessary, independent, useful and not inferior. Finally, evaluations of individual dialects can be arranged on a cline, which may have something to do with the breadth of their representation in literature. 1.4. The readers of dialect Who, then, can be expected to read dialect, and for which purposes? As stated above, dialect is no longer the dominant means of spoken communication — and dialect was never easy to read. Whereas Reuter's novels, written in consistent Low German throughout, were popular in the 19th century, they are now available in West Germany only in High German translations. In Britain, the times of Yorkshire almanacks providing popular entertainment in the local dialects and the rich tradition of written Scots in cheap novels and an exciting range of newspaper writings (cf. Donaldson 1989) were over by 1920,6 and Lorimer's New Testament in Scots (1983) is probably bought as a badge of Scottish identity more often than as a text to be read and enjoyed. All this is guesswork — we sorely lack thorough investigations of who reads dialect texts, and in which genres, and what kind of dialect readers are willing to put up with (fairly authentic versions for local consumption, but diluted folkloristic types in texts meant for wider distribution?). The history of English and Scots dialects in the colonies adds a curious facet as to who wrote and who read non-standard texts. It is significant that two of the most remarkable translations of parts of the Bible into Scots were made 6

D.H. Lawrence's literary uses of dialect in his poems and novels illustrate the Notts, and Derbys, dialect of a — predominantly — 'pre-industrial' society, a speech community in which dialect was dominant with the miners, and a plausible, if problematic, choice for Mellors in Lady Chatterley's Lover (1928). A novelist writing in the 1980s would certainly not have used 'traditional' dialect for characterization.

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outwith Scotland — at least partly for overseas readers. W.W. Smith translated and published his Scots version of Matthew in Canada — later expanded to include all four gospels — and the broad Scotch of the title changed to Braid Scots. His version remained the most substantial Biblical translation into Scots before Lorimer. H.P. Cameron left Scotland in 1896 at the age of 44, and in his sixties, in Australia, "faur awa frae Bonnie Scotland", in Australia, translated the Imitation of Christ and Genesis into Scots (published in the year of his death, 1921, in Scotland). To quote from Tulloch's summary (1989:64-65): As is clear from his Prefatory Note, Cameron was conscious of the strange­ ness of working on a translation into Scots in the Australian "bush" but he claimed that '[...] e'en mids the eldritch yowling o' the dingo [...] he haes hard [...] the "saft, couthie" müsick o' the Doric'.

Quite similar is the story of one of the best-known NE Scots poets, Charles Murray. He emigrated to South Africa in 1888, when he was 24, and did not return to his native Scotland until he retired. So his most famous poems were written in South Africa — for his Scottish co-patriots in Scotland, or all over the world? Add that the first Glasgow novel', J.J. Bell's Wee Macgreegor of 1901, had its largest sales in the U.S., repeating the success story of Frances Hodgson Burnett, whose That Lass o' Lowries, first published in America in 1877, was hailed there as the most "powerful work from a woman's hand in the English language" — despite its Lancashire background and broad Lancashire dialect in the dialogues. Also consider the popularity among some British readers around the turn of the century (so Colin Milton reminds me) of Joel Chandler Harris' Uncle Remus Stories (as attested in Kipling's Stalky and Co.). It appears, then, that up until 1920 important dialect texts in various genres such as Biblical translation, poems and novels were written both outside the proper dialect-speaking areas and for overseas readers who were either emigrants or must have read such works for their linguistic appeal. Much research, however, remains to be done on the composition of the audiences and on the language used in works by these authors — did it become stereotyped or fossi­ lized, and how did authors (and publishers) accommodate to the competences of non-dialect readers? All this serves to show that the 'success' of a dialect translation must be considered in relation to the characteristic features of the speech community, for whom the dialect may be normal, or common at least in spoken form, or in certain types of writing, and carry various connotations of prestige or stigma. The most important criterion appears to be the vitality of the dialect in question; three different positions arise from this relating to the acceptance of dialect writings. Readers may approve of such texts

228

a) b) c)

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if they are more easily intelligible than the standard language; if at least a substantial group of speakers is left to enjoy the text; (if the dialect is on the verge of extinction) hoping to preserve a docu­ ment of it — or even hoping that the translation may help to stem the obsolescence of the dialect.7

2. Linguistic requirements for successful translations The conditions that must be met if a translation is to be successful can be arranged according to requirements with regard to the language, the translator, and the reader or audience. It is an old myth to assume that all languages are equally suitable and that every text can consequently be translated into any other language: factual, stylistic and formal characteristics of individual languages may well disqualify them for certain functions, in particular for literary genres. It is well known that a language becomes impoverished if its range of communicational functions is reduced, a development that can have language death as its final stage. Dialects tend to a) b) c)

be primarily spoken; have a more restricted range of registers and stylistic conventions, especially in the more formal uses; and be restricted to intimate, unofficial, non-public uses.

If the High language in use is genetically related, dialects tend to have become more and more influenced by the respective standard languages; their lexicons tend to be eroded by transfer of standard items which may or may not be adapted in pronunciation. Therefore, not only did the expansion of most Euro­ pean dialects stop from the age of industrialization onwards (so that these languages tend not to have expressions of their own for motorcars, railway, fridge, etc.), but they also lose much of the distinctive lexis they had for

7

Such attempts are usually seen in a very critical light. Compare William Barnes, a very active writer of Dorset dialect poetry who nevertheless believed that composing poetry in "a fast-outwearing speech form" might seem "as idle as writing one's name in snow on a spring day" (Barnes 1869). H. Mertz, the translator of the Straßburg Max and Moritz, thought it pointless to commission an Upper Alsatian version (p.c.) because that dialect "is on its last legs" (auf dem letzten Loche pfeift). There is, for instance, no hope that texts such as Max & Moritz translations might stabilize Cimbrian (cf. Wurzer 1983) or Sudeten Silesian — nor had the authors such an aim in mind. For the various North Frisian and Romansh/Ladin trans­ lations, however, such considerations do seem to have played a part.

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everyday concepts (many words would, of course, die with the things they denoted falling into disuse through technological development). Various genres of text have been translated into dialect, or were in fact originally written in it, with various degrees of success. It appears that the text I have chosen provides an excellent opportunity for a successful translation, having as its subject an uneducated pre-industrial village community of a type that was similar all over 18th-/19th-century Europe. If there are formal diffi­ culties about metre and rhyme, they would not be notably different from those of the H language. This means that even a drastically impoverished language (such as Cimbrian German in Northern Italy) can be expected to have enough resources for such a translation. On the other hand, if the dialect in question has been levelled with the standard to a considerable degree, there are only two solutions left, both involving great dangers: a)

The translator can use an older form of the dialect. This was Bibby's solution for Northumbrian English (in Görlach 1986a), when he translated (as he stated himself) "into old-fashioned mid-19th-century verse". Paul Hennings chose a very similar solution when he opted for the less diluted Dithmarschen dialect of his childhood predating World War I as he ex­ plicitly states in his epilogue (cf. Görlach 1982a). However, he also turned to the dictionary, as MacDiarmid and others had done before him, in order to complement the lexis and enhance the local features, thus creating an artificially pure form of the dialect and running the risk of being criticised, as Spenser was by Ben Jonson, with the accusation that "in affecting [imitating] the ancients" he "writ no language".

b)

The alternative solution is different, but also dangerous: some attempts at putting the village story into modern urban dialect have failed (imagine the two boys as Cockneys) or seem somehow inappropriate: much as I like Stephen Mulrine's Glaswegian rendering, the tone of it may sound like 'refined Gorbals speech' to many listeners. Dialect lexis is different from urban slang. Therefore, it is only where dialect has survived as the normal medium for everyday communication (at least for substantial numbers of speakers) that translations of Max and Moritz have been successful: versions into the urban dialects of Cologne, Mannheim, Vienna and Zürich are evidence for this.

The problem of finding a good translator is inherent in what has been said about the language. If the dialect is to be pure and to sound natural, your ideal informants used to be the non-mobile old rural males — i.e. people who are unlikely to be gifted poets (although speakers of broad dialect are often excellent

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story-tellers). As it happens, to translate into dialect is much more difficult than to write an authentic-sounding lyrical poem in it. While most of the authors of the dialect versions that were suggested to me and whom I commissioned to undertake the translation were male and some were old, they were all very sophisticated users of the standard and the dialect — which they would have normally spoken in their childhood, since when the standard has long become dominant. There is a paradox involved here, since handling the dialect the way it is required in dialect writing, especially in translation, means using it with a degree of sophistication that does not normally go with it. It does not come as a surprise, then, that successful translations can even be made into non-native dialects (as McClure from Ayrshire did when doing the NE Scots version, or Herning from Fife when Shetlandizing the text). It goes without saying that the draft translation should be carefully checked by a native speaker of the dialect used. However, even if a language structure is suitable for the job, or is made pliable by skilful handling, and a translator is competent in the source language and target dialect and a clever versifier, too, a translation will not necessarily be a success. To achieve this, a native-speaker audience must demand such a text and be convinced that this is worth buying and reading. Where such a demand exists, dialect texts have often been successful whose poor poetic quality did not really deserve acclaim: delighted to have a well-known story in their native dialect, readers will often be taken in by the novelty of the idea and not look out for blemishes which they may well be inclined to blame on the insufficiencies of the dialect rather than incompetent handling by the author. On the other hand, a translation without a native-speaker audience can give pleasure to readers who enjoy linguistic playfulness, but this kind of philological delight is certainly quite different from that of a native speaker who has no linguistic alternative outside his dialect. To summarize: before translating a text into language X, the translator should make sure that there is an appropriate register for it. As it happens, Max and Moritz would seem to be an ideal text for translations — although there are difficulties in some languages (cf. the postscript to Görlach 1982b), especially those lacking a tradition of rhymed and metrical poetry, or of light verse.8 As 8

The first translations of Max and Moritz into Hebrew were hampered by the lack of an appropriate style, and by the audiences' expectations of what a proper children's book in Hebrew should be like (cf. Toury 1980); I was told that an authentic-looking translation into Scots Gaelic is impossible because there is no rhyming tradition for light verse in the language. (A very good one has now been made.) Whether the translations I commissioned and edited (Görlach 1986a) in West African Krio, Cameroonian and Tok Pisin — all Ian-

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regards dialect translations, the first question that needs to be asked is whether there is a use for such texts — is there an audience that has the dialect as the dominant language of daily communication, or loves to have texts in dialect, whether for nostalgic, preservationist, nationalistic/regionalistic reasons, or just because of the fun that a reader or hearer can derive from linguistic playfulness? As regards reactions, the Shetlandic version greatly appealed to local children, who read the story in a separate edition, and the reviewers of Annand's Canongate edition liked the idea and the quality of the translation. The preconditions for successful versions existed, then, in the case of Scots: gifted translators, a literary tradition (including children's books) in all dialects, a setting for which a parallel could be found in 19th-century Scotland, and similarities in language structure between the German of the original and the Scots dialects used. Let us now see what linguistic features are found in the four modern translations and whether these help to illustrate the problems and solutions of the Scots renderings. I will exclude syntax since this apparently did not present any great problems (with the possible exception of a stressed syllable at the beginnings of lines, a feature difficult to achieve consistently in Scots, English and many other languages).9 3. Individual linguistic levels analysed 3.1. Sounds For Busch, the easy flow of his lines sound was hard-won; it is the result of came later than the illustrations). To original successfully, it is best to look

and the harmony of metre, rhythm and diligent work on individual lines (which check whether translators rendered the at onomatopoeia and names first.

3.1.1. Onomatopoeia The great number of onomatopoetic 'half-words' in Max and Moritz has driven many translators to despair; many have decided to do without equivalents since they would not sound natural in the target language. Only Germanic dialects (mainly of German and Scots) appear not to have any substantial problems here. This is partly due to their genetic relationship with Busch's German, partly

guages without rhyming poetry in the Western sense — were 'successful' is difficult to judge: what the texts show is that such experiments are possible (cf. Görlach 1986c). 9 The topic combines problems of prosody, syntax and literary traditions and therefore cannot be exhaustively treated in a linguistic article.

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8 Max and Moritz in Scots

because these informal snippets are even more easily admissible in dialect than they are in Standard German. The four Scots translations beautifully illustrate the possibilities (selection):10 G 167

ritzeratze

182 184 253 318

kracks! plumps! rums! ! kritze, kratze

349 356 369

puff! schwapp! knusper, knasper

387 395

rabs! ricke-racke

rizzle-razz!

L

skrechanskrachan crack! crack! crack! plop! splat! kaboom! woof! scribble, — scrabble whoosh! fuff! splat! — nibble, nibble, nibble nibble wheech! — rickle-rackle nicketienacketie

A bizziebuzzie

S skritty-skratt

— platch! flist!

—

— bang! skarty-skrit

poof! flaff! moupiemappie

boof! platsh!

— —

whoosh

— —

However, the most ingenious rendering is certainly Annand's 'translation' of schnupdiwup! describing the quick action of the boys' snaffling of the hens. His variation of eentie teentie, haligolum — ticketie, tacketie — thickerie, thackerie — fitherie, fetherie blends children's linguistic playfulness with an echo of Celtic numbers (such as the Cumbrian sheepcounting terms). 3.1.2. Names The choice of names depends on a great number of factors — national con­ ventions, allusions to existing persons or places, rhyming and metrical potential, etc. — but sound is an important element in all this. All four translators very wisely decided to discard the German names and to find proper Scottish equiva­ lents instead, as can be seen from a comparison of all personal names used:

10

Some of Meier's onomatopoetic solutions are, of course, conjectural: we don't know in all cases what 16th-century Scotsmen would have said, or might have said: 49 Cokmaduidill, duidill, de!; 50 Chukmachuk; 13 Quippmaquhapp!; 120 youff! youff! youff!; 167 quhischmaclink!; 172/183 guk, guk, gut, 182 Crak!; 184 Splischmasplasch!; 253 Quhrang!; 317 scartmascayre; 321 A!; 325 Owch!; 347 Quhousch!; 349 Quhouff!; 355 Crak!; 356 Quhapp!', 364 Quhouff!; 369 Knybbil, knabbil!; 385 Ha! Harrou!; 387 Quhapp!; 395 Rikkillrakkill,, rikkillrakill!

8 Max and Moritz in Scots G Max & Moritz Bolte Böck Lämpel Fritz Mecke

Mat & Malkie Blooter Boke Lampwick James Mac

L Dod & Davie Bauld Goat Duncan Jock Broun

A Mac & Matthy Bannock Gait Lintie Tarn Mains

233 S

Jarm & Jeemsie Baald Lamb Tait Olly Magnie

X Mak& Moreis Bautie Bukkie Lampill Fred Makkinla

The mos: ingenious name-giving is probably S Muirme's, wno cans his neroes 'Matt and Malkie' — his most famous Glasgow poem, dealing with those imps and good-for-nothings, being "The coming of the wee malkies". 3.1.3. Rhyming potential of Scots Onomatopoetic words and names can be considered as significant, but marginal for the system as a whole. Therefore an analysis of how the phonological structure of Scots was used for new rhymes is enlightening. The overall impression is that all four dialects are structurally similar as far as the phonology of rhymes is concerned. If we disregard the words that have no genetic equivalent in English, two types of rhymes are of linguistic interest: (1)

The rhyme pairs consist of words that would also make a perfect rhyme in English, though differently pronounced: (a) vowel sounds: schooh:stool - L schuil:stuil, S schöl:stöl·, lang:sang (E: o), mair.flair (E: o), oot';doot (E: ou) (b) consonants: nicht:sicht, thocht:brocht (E: gh)

(2)

One of the words has a distinctively Scots form which permits a rhyme with a word whose form is shared by English and Scots: (a) vowel sounds (examples from G): dae (do):say, same'.hame (home), need'.heid (head), us choose (house); compare the different phonology of A: dee (do):be, here'.seer (sure). (b) consonants: cluster reductions in finn (find):win, grun (ground):fun, toun:aroun; also note /g/ in big:brig (bridge), lig'.brig (lie:bridge); and vocalization of /1/ 'in faa (fall):craw, bad:caa'd (called).

A substitution test shows that most of the 'typically Scots' rhymes are possible across dialect boundaries, i.e. what is found in G is also possible in S — if the words are shared. Although dialectologists have shown that vowel systems differ a great deal in various Scots dialects, there is also a striking similarity if they

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8 Max and Moritz in Scots

are jointly contrasted with English — at least as regards the evidence extracted from the Max & Moritz data. 3.2. Word-formation Whereas the patterns used for compounds and most derivatives are incon­ spicuous, the most typical Scots feature, hypocoristic forms in -ie, calls for comment. The distribution in the four versions is very typical: the NE version has them in abundance — 41 perfect examples plus 7 monomorphematic words in -ie (type: crannie). Even if a few of these might have been selected because of their metrical convenience, the use of the pattern conforms with our expec­ tations of a NE text, a landscape studded with loonies, Kennies and their eg gies, mannies and their doggies, geesies and other corpies. By contrast, Annand uses only a few words in -ie: there are 14 + 2 instances, of which 6 are laddies, and the Shetland and Glasgow texts have no unambiguous examples whatsoever. Whatever the history of the pattern, its present-day geographical (and stylistic, social) distribution is striking. This reflection lends itself to lead on to more general aspects of Scots lexis. 3.3. Standard Scots and regional lexis The five authors share a distinctively Scots lexis — but the overlap in G is only slight. There are a number of reasons why the common lexis in XLAS is so conspicuous: (1) (2)

(3)

11

The authors, Annand (L), Herning (S), McClure (A) and Meier (X) are all academics, philologists, with a strong leaning to older Scots literature. L is a variety with strong literary traditions, reaching back to Burns and beyond, whereas A and S are dialects which are generally claimed to have kept the specifically Scots lexis intact. This markedly traditional character of modern literary Scots makes the Middle Scots version (X), supposedly more than four hundred years old, lexically less distinct than one might well have expected.11 The same source has obviously prompted identical Scots reflexes, probably because there was only one general Scots word available as a translation equivalent in many cases.

Meier (p.c.) preferred words recorded in Middle and Modern Scots to make his text easier to understand; also, his text is to be read with modern (and not a reconstructed historical) pronunciation.

8 Max and Moritz in Scots

235

3.3.1. Lexical density The number of words used in a text needing a gloss is an important indication of how readily it will be understood. It is obvious that readers differ in the words they know, or use, or believe they know or use. All this depends on their native dialect, their linguistic knowledge and the reliability of their selfjudgment. When I compiled the glossaries for the Scots translations I put myself in the position of an Englishman without any knowledge of Scots, written or spoken, Standard or regional, and without any memories of Burns and Scott. I may have included a few words not really in need of a gloss, preferring to risk having too many than too few. There was no time to test my list when editing the texts, but I have since asked a few informants to go through the glossaries supplied and mark the glosses they needed (or thought necessary). Although the numbers of glosses are far from representative they permit a few interesting hypotheses. Here are my (MG) figures and those of three Scottish, an English and an American informant:12

G L A S

Glasgow St Scots Aberdeen Shetland

MG

BK

CM

JKA

js

E

A

47 154 236 171

2 9 55 97

6 13 46 80

— 30 49

10 17 71 101

30 117 221 169

45 151 235 171

608

163

145

83

199

537

602

4

The three Scottish informants, all active in writing or teaching Scots, had no problem with Glaswegian or Standard Scots, and the fact that there is so little difference between the three marks them as Scottish literati: of the 154 glosses I provided for Annand's text, only 9 and 13 were felt to be necessary by BK and CM (and none, of course, by the author himself). It is much more remarkable how high the number of glosses for the NE and Shetland version was for the three even if the figure for common Scots words was very high for NE (so that my 236 glosses came down a great deal for the Scottish informants). By 12 The first three 'informants' are Scottish colleagues with an academic literary background, JKA in fact one of the translators. The set of glosses combined from the three replies (js) may be taken as an approximation of how many words are unknown even among this quite unrep­ resentative sample. E is an English lecturer with some childhood affiliations to Scotland, whereas A, the American colleague, has neither personal nor literary interest in Scotland. Note that the informants did not go through the texts to add further words they did not readily understand but which were not glossed in the book: all the individual figures would therefore have been higher — by whatever small difference.

236

8 Max and Moritz in Scots

contrast, in the Shetland text half of the glosses offered were useful or necessary for all of the three (although JKA, from his experience as an editor of Scots texts, knew considerably more words than ΒΚ and CM). The most significant figures are probably those listed under js (= joint set of the three Scottish informants) since they reflect the regional distinction of Northeastern and Shetlandic lexis most clearly. The non-Scottish informants (both university teachers) also confirmed the standard vs regional Scots distinction: whereas the American (A), never having been exposed to Burnsian and other Scots, needed almost all the glosses offered, their number came down by 37 in L, by 17 in G and by 15 in A for the educated Englishman (E). 3.3.2. Results checked against dictionary evidence The question of how common the words used in G, L, A and S are can also be tested with the help of a dictionary. The Concise Scots Dictionary (CSD, Robinson 1985) is an excellent tool for this. As would be expected, all L words are in, and the high ratio of common words in A is confirmed: the CSD omits only 33 of A's words (= 14%), probably because they were felt to be too local, and includes another 11 with a regional restriction ('NE' etc.) indicated (timmerin, mineer, swippert, mangin, list, smool, wap, trackie, hoornet, crumpy, sosst)', the NE character of the text is much more evident in the phonology of the words used — and the great number of -ie diminutives (some of these may of course be metri causa). The lexis used in the Shetlandic version is clearly distinct: the use of local words is testified by 62% non-inclusion in CSD, and 8% marked entries — a proportion larger than with any other region, even including the Northeast. Testing the text's comprehensibility on Shetland schoolchildren was apparently successful — although they might, as Herning most certainly did, look up entries in Graham's (1979) dictionary.13 The fact that Shetland lexis is so different has of course to do with its Norn heritage: although most of Jakobsen's 10,000 or so words collected around the turn of the century are special terms (especially of fishery and boat-building), a great many (still) survive in everyday speech. It is difficult to quantify the sources of the Shetlandic vocabulary, since many words could be either Scots or Norn, but it seems fair to conjecture that about half of Shetland's current 13

The dictionary has obviously come to be regarded as a regional asset; it appears to be used more than dialect dictionaries normally are, and may even have contributed a little towards stopping the lexical erosion of the local dialect.

8 Max and Moritz in Scots

237

dialect lexis is from Norn, and this statement is also true for the Max and Moritz glosses. 3.3.3. The question of literary ('Burnsian') Scots Finally, it seemed worthwhile checking how many of the words used by the four authors are 'traditional literary' Scots associated with authors like Burns and Scott. It is no surprise to find that L and A contain the highest proportion of such lexis; labelling this kind of Scots 'Burnsian' for short does not mean that Burns invented these words, but that they rerjresent a vocabulary that is usually transmitted to the general 20th-century reader through Robert Burns's poems. This lexis is close to Annand's intentions, being (a) (b) (c)

predominantly Central Scots, with a western bias, comparatively well-known (and still widespread at least in passive competence) and of a popular-literary kind. (Note, however, that Annand refrains from direct borrowings from Burns, apart from cutty sark — and that on the editor's suggestion).

The situation is slightly different with A: since McClure is from Ayrshire himself, he must have felt Burnsian lexis close to his own language, and being a literary academic, the 'literary' associations of some of the lexis would not have disturbed him. Translating into a dialect not his own (but well-known through osmosis), he must have been tempted to stress common-core Scots, even though there is of course also a great deal of Northeastern lexis in his text. Both L and A reflect, then — in a moderate form — a tendency towards conservative diction, a tendency inherent in so much poetry written in Scots:14 but the two authors definitely avoid quarrying Dunbar and Jamieson's Dictionary. Although Herning's background is very much like McClure's (and as he was born in Fife, he also wrote in a dialect he does not speak natively), the traditional lexis is much more submerged in S. This is likely to reflect the character of the dialect: Shetlandic is so very different from common-core Scots that it is excluded from Scots dictionaries (such as the CSD). It is no surprise that local words greatly outnumber general vocabulary in Herning's version (no doubt partly a consequence of the assistance of John Graham and his dic­ tionary). By contrast, Mulrine in his colloquial version in modern Glaswegian 14

The fact itself is no surprise in speech communities for which Scots is a minority option and for most of the authors not the dominant language; also, written uses of dialect tend to stress 'established' lexis, a tendency most notable in 'respectable' genres.

238

8 Max and Moritz in Scots

had little use for Lallans lexis — although his use of a moderate number of such words shows that he did not completely reject it. Here is a list of 'traditional' words and their use in GLAS; X is included for comparison for words found in GLAS: aiblins L airt LX ava AS bere AS bide LX bield L bien A blate LSX breeks LX braw LAX bumcloke GL callant L canny A cantie LA clachan A cleek AX chiel LAS collieshangie L cowp L craig L crouse LS cutty (sark) L darg LXA

ding LA doo A douce LAX dreich A eident A forby L ferlie A footh S gar LX gate A gear L geek L gleg A gowk A graith L greet LASX gumption L hap L howk G ken L kyte L leal LA leir AS

lift AS loof AS loon(ie) AX low(in) L lowp LX lowss LX lug L lum GLAX maun LAX mell L mense AX neuk S nieve SX pliskie A poke LX powe L pree AX rede A rowth LX sark LS scraich S skellum L skelp L

sleekit A smeddum A sned A soom L souch S spunks L steek LA stieve L syne LX tent LAX threep A thole AX tint LA trig A trou A tyke A unco LX wale LAX wame GLA weans G

This selection: L = 53x; A = 44x; S = 14x; G = 4x This test is impressionistic since it is based on the Oxford glossary to a selection of Burns. Other traditional words found in GLAS not included in the list above are: ashet GLAX atweel L baxter LX bedeen A blad L blydesome L

blye AX bouk A but-end S comprie L dernin L dominie LAX

dram L dree ASX dumfounert L dwine S fegs LA fient L

gey L gomerel L humphin GL ill-faured L jalouse A list A

8 Max and Moritz in Scots

lunt A moil L moolies L neep LS neb L ongauns L oxtered L oy L

Pace AX pinkie LX quat L reck A reese A reek v. L scart LAS sclim A

scrievin L scuddy LAS skail LAX smaithers L smiddrins A snod A stishie L stramash L

239

stairve A swythe AX tim GX traachle A weird AX wittan L yammer LA

This selection: L. = 35x; A = 24x; S = 4x; G = 4x It must be admitted that the decision about which words are 'traditional' literary Scots is even more subjective in the second group — it may in fact reflect the investigator's conditioning to what is 'normal' or standard in Scots. 3.4. Stylistic and sociolectal variation When Busch decided to use Standard German for almost all of his poetry (rather than Low German, the 'language of his heart') he did so for a variety of reasons — some in fact similar to those a 19th-century Scotsman might have adduced to explain his choice of English: 'High' German was of much wider reach (a factor very important if a text is to find a publisher); it was much easier to read (even for native speakers of Low German); and it had a much richer literary tradition and greater stylistic range and flexibility, so that stylistic distinctions introduced in the text would be recognised much more easily by the readers. Busch was thus able to contrast the uneducated speakers of Low German, Farmer Mecke, and of faulty German, Uncle Fritz, with the teacher; he was able to express Widow Bolte's false pathos by using high-flown clichés in mockformal register. Most dialects lack such a range, and translators are consequently at a loss — they will normally have to neglect such niceties (and possibly try to find other distinctions which will then not be equivalent). Languages like Scots and Jamaican Creole are, by contrast, eminently appropriate for such shifts in style: speakers, especially those with a knack for linguistic playfulness and sophistication, will move up and down the cline of linguistic broadness according to addressee, topic, and situation, and may do so with their tongues firmly placed in their cheeks. However, there are inherent dangers: one is that moving towards formality will bring you close to English (or right into it) — a move that a translator into Scots may well wish to avoid: when the widow reflects on her dead hens prematurely 'ravished from this vale of tears' (in W. Arndt's congenial translation), should a translator use Scottish

240

8 Max and Moritz in Scots

Biblical English? Or try Lorimeresque diction? The four authors did nothing of the sort, and probably wisely so, since such experimenting would be very difficult to interpret for the reader. To summarise: the translators' task is precarious if there is no equivalent text type and, in particular, no literary tradition to fall back on. The problem is not confined to dialect translation: the history of translations of classical Greek and Roman poetry into the modern European standard languages is full of such difficulties. But since the problem is general, there is no need to stress its relevance for dialect writing: it is just that the more formal the expected style is, the less likely a dialect writer is to succeed. The problem is obviously connected not only with linguistic expressiveness and pliability, but with acceptability and prestige. There is no doubt that a fairy tale, a native form in all European traditions and linguistically close to vernacular traditions, is likely to permit the translator to find satisfactory equivalences. And yet, the degrees of success will vary, as can be illustrated with three types of translations of Grimm's Fairy Tales collected in the Penguin edition (Grimm 1982). The Standard German ones were rendered, as was to be expected, into St E, with success, but without any con­ spicuous features. However, this collection is the first to translate German dialect texts into dialect. The Low German source of tales such as the one about the fisherman and his wife could be transposed into a Banffshire fishing village without any loss, the content and fishermen's speech being a perfect match. On the other hand, the decision to render Swiss and Austrian dialect tales into IrE is much more problematic: it is obvious that the very different prestige of these varieties leads to wrong interpretations of the tone of the IrE translations. Similar problems arose when Shaw's Pygmalion was translated into various European languages and the translators found that there was no equivalent of Cockney. It is even more difficult to translate two varieties coexisting within a single work. Burns's work was very influential for dialect writing in Britain, but he also had a great impact on the continent. It is difficult to imagine what the poetry of German authors like Johann Peter Hebel and Klaus Groth would have been like, had they not had Burns's poems for a model. However, when the latter came to be translated, it was always into Standard German throughout, or (as by Groth himself) into consistent Low German: he did not attempt to render the changes back and forth between dialect and standard, which are so typical of some of Burns's writing. Sociolectal variation presents similar difficulties. Should Mecke, LowGerman-speaking (for most of the time) in Busch, be characterised by a special

8 Max and Moritz in Scots

241

form of Scots, preferably one indicative of boorishness? McClure, for his NE text, chose the speech of an Ayrshire farmer, translating the linguistic distance, but not the social one; Herning did contrast his farmer's rural Whalsay speech with 'metropolitan' Lerwick forms — but the difference is of course lost to all outside Shetland (and probably to most speakers inside the islands, too). 3.5. Localisation The choice of names mentioned above is only one obvious means of providing a distinctively Scottish background to the Max and Moritz story. Much of the effectiveness of the four translations rests on the authors' skilful substitution of other Scottish features. The widow's favourite dish, sauerkraut, obviously disagrees with Scottish palates; so the passage comes out as: G

the Widda takes an ashet doon, tae get some peas-brose oot the dunny

L

ashet sune was piled wi heaps o gowden creamy champit neeps

A

wi an ashet, for tae wale oot a drappie saatit kail

S

fir ta hent a coarn o kail, lyin wöshen in a pail.

And here is what the tailor was famous for: G

troosers or a suit, wi weskit poackits rerr an haundy, tails fur werrin oan a Sunday,

L

Shiftin claes and Sabbath claes, warm top-coats for wintry days, lang-legg'd breeks and cutty cloaks, weskits fou o handy pokes [...] wurkin claes fur through the week, jaikits, nicky-tams rale neat —

A

Claes for Sabbath or the ouk, warm quytes tae hap yer bouk, queetikins an moggans lang, weskits tee wi pooches Strang, [...]

S

Wirkin plags an Sunday stroods, ooen breeks an cotts wi hoods, weskits at hed muckle pooches, wirset froaks and aaldwives mutches [...]

242

8 Max and Moritz in Scots

Of the four cultures, Shetland stands out in various respects which made further accommodation of the story necessary. The boys obviously cannot steal 'apples, pears and plums' as they do in the original and the other Scottish versions. In S the relevant line becomes: raandrin taaties, neeps or peas.

There being no apple-trees available for the hens' premature death, Herning had to put up with the only Shetland tree: dis me life's maist lichtsome tings fae yon elder-tree nou hings!

The boys' uncle is introduced, appropriately enough, in A's northeastern lines: Fa in clachan or in toun hes an uncle bidin roon [...]

but S's substitution has the authentic island touch about it: Maist young fock an uncle hae bidin i dis isles an sae

Although, then, in the Scots versions substitutions need not go as far as in various English-related creoles in cultures that have no duvets or organs, no sauerkraut or easy chairs, the Scottish translators have made excellent use of the possibilities of adding an authentic sound beyond proper spelling, syntax and lexis — Scottish children are likely to recognise in the two laddies or loonies a reflection of themselves, or of their Scottish mates. 4. Vitality of a dialect and successful dialect literature How current, well-known or vital must a dialect be to make successful dialect poetry possible? If phrased in such general terms, the question is put in the wrong way, since it does not include the recipient or addressee. There is no doubt that a certain type of writing requires widespread linguistic competence in its readers or listeners if it is to be a success. Thus most of the 19th-century newspaper texts in 'braid Scots' assembled in Donaldson (1989) presuppose a readership to whom the language is so natural that they are willing to plough through expository prose of various kinds in phonetically spelt Scots — texts that make sense only if you can translate the spelling into your particular form of speech. However, the texts make heavy reading if you are not acquainted with spoken Scots, and today nobody except philologists/linguists would be willing to work their way through them. Moreover, to write and to read about the Afghan or Russo-Turkish wars (1877-78) in what strikes one as

8 Max and Moritz in Scots

243

forceful Scots prose sounds, or rather looks, odd in our time: the range of functions that written Scots can be put to has certainly narrowed since the 19th century. Poems are different.15 Readers always expect that they will have to put some effort into a close reading of the text: there is a certain degree of willingness to do so. It is significant that dialect writing in many parts of Western Europe used to be rare as long as the dialect was in everyday use, and that the types of text for which dialect was employed differed from region to region. Apart from a few cases, dialect literature nowadays is written for readers who also have the standard language available (often as their dominant form), so that dialect can serve the extra functions of intimacy, informality, relaxation and humour. If it is meant to fill such niches, the genres and attitudes are predetermined; a nostalgic, often sentimental glorification of the past, of rustic simplicity and honesty is likely to predominate and stereotyped language to be combined with all this. If this type of writing prevails, it will normally be written for the generations involved in language shift who have not lost the language of their childhood and are not perfectly at home, intellectually and emotionally, in the standard language. Success is often determined by the dialect medium much rather than the literary quality, linguistic sophistication, thematic appropriateness or intellectual honesty. The four translators brought very different qualifications to the job, but they also worked with varieties of Scots of quite divergent status. The 'traditional' forms of Shetlandic and Northeastern Scots share the element of regionality, but NE Scots is possibly becoming obsolescent more quickly, and writing in it a more literary activity than is the case for Shetlandic. Standard Scots is a literary variety, but then the skill of J.K. Annand and his experience as a writer of children's books in Scots meant that there was little danger of his becoming artificial.16 It might seem that Mulrine, writing in the most vital dialect, Glas­ wegian, and being a renowned writer, was in the best position to do a successful translation. But was he? I have always liked his translation very much and

15

It must be admitted that the majority of poems about the Great War in Scots also sound somewhat unusual today: cf. Milton (1991). 16 Reviewers praised Annand's tour de force highly. As R. Michaelis-Jena said in the Times Educational Supplement: "His handling of Max and Moritz is superb. He has caught not just the rhythm and metre of the original, but has sensitively re-created and transformed its atmosphere." Philip Harman (in Lallans) found: "Straught intil the Scots frae the skire, raucle German o Wilhelm Busch is this muckle skeelie daurg o J.K. Annand. [...] J.K. Annand's Scots hes the verra souch o the kittle deviltrie of Busch's smervie German."

244

8

Max and Moritz in Scots

admired his skill in putting the 'village story' into racy urban dialect, a tradition that goes back at least to J.J. Bell's Wee MacGreegor of 1901 (which is, of course, in prose). But still, I am not sure whether the overtones of broad Glaswegian make for easy expansion into light children's verse. Any sophisti­ cated literary use of a dialect has an element of artificiality, but the 'mismatch' appears to be more noticeable for many people in the case of urban varieties. Finally, all of the four translators appear to have been aided by a peculiar similarity in what people find funny that seems to be common to North Germans and Scotsmen, which could be related to the grim Northern humour found in Icelandic sagas — but this is speculation, and certainly beyond the linguist's terrain. These qualifications do not fully apply if the dialect text is intended to serve one of two other functions, viz. (1)

(2)

to stabilise a vanishing dialect by expanding its uses through writing in new text types. It ought to be quite clear, however, that well-meant intentions will remain fruitless unless the acceptability of the texts is secured; to provide philological delight for readers enjoying the text as a playful exercise in linguistic variety. Such an exercise is even possible with texts composed in dead languages, as exemplified in our case by Meier's translation into Middle Scots.

4.1. The special case of the Middle Scots version Meier's translation has not been extensively mentioned in this paper so far. Excellent as it is, it is quite different from GLAS, since there are no native speakers around to whom it could be addressed. The translator chose a form of Scots in use in the heyday of Scots literature in the 16th century. In a way, this period provides better possibilities for a successful translation (MacDiarmid might have said) than the modern versions, since Scots was then a full language employed naturally in many more domains than can be imagined today. How­ ever, the lack of a native-speaker audience, competent to judge not only gram­ matical correctness but also stylistic adequacy and sociolinguistic acceptability, places the translation outside the main trend of our discussion. Meier's version is much better discussed in the context of 'diachronic translation' (cf. Görlach 1986b).

8 Max and Moritz in Scots

245

5. Conclusion "The great pest of speech is frequency of translation", Dr Johnson stated in 1755. If this were to be understood as a general comment, it would certainly be misplaced. The emergence of modern standard languages would have been impossible had it not been for the continual expansion of their lexis and syntactical patterns, much of which was derived from translations, especially from Latin. Apart from such increase in scope and flexibility, translated texts ranging from medicine to classical epic gave Englishmen of Shakespeare's days confidence in their own language. Translations are still a useful way of exploring the potential of minority languages like Scots and expanding their structures where they prove deficient ('Quhar scant was Scottis', as Gavin Douglas put it in 1513); the recent collection edited by France & Glen (1989) impressively demonstrates how Scots translators have used this opportunity in the 20th century — at least in the field of literature. The Max and Moritz renderings here discussed are among the best ever made of the text. They show beautifully the expressiveness of varieties of Scots as far apart in geography and style as Glasgow vernacular and Shetlandic. However, Englishmen in the Renaissance clearly formulated a set of prin­ ciples which can also be applied to present-day Scots: a language must be accepted by its speakers, must be cultivated by its best writers, and must have the prestige that gives its potential users the certainty that it is worth the effort. Mulcaster's famous question of 1592, "Why not all in English?", with which he attacked the continuing predominance of Latin, would have to be rephrased as "Whit wey no aa in Scots?" today. However, formulating the question makes one realise how unrealistic it sounds. Although the times appear to be over for a full and independent national language for Scotland, the success of the Max and Moritz translations points to the feasibility of having many more texts in Scots that both continue the tradition of Scots writing — and are good fun.

DOD AND DAVIE

TRANSLATED

BY

}. Κ. Α Ν Ν Α Ν D

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INDEX OF NAMES

The following index includes names of authors referred to in the text, of placenames, and titles of individual works; names mentioned only once are normally omitted. Africa 24-8 Agheyisi, Rebecca 66 Aitken, A.J. 169 Alaska 57 Albert, Miller O. 31 Algeo, John 7-8,117-9 American Speech 136 Anand, Mulk Raj 217 Annand, J.K. 221-45 Anstey, F. 218 Antrim 172 Arndt, Walter 239 Arnold, Mathew 215 Asia Week 23 Australia 13, 18, 20, 21, 33, 42, 46, 47, 50-3, 64, 111, 116-7, 125, 142-6, 162-3, 154, 187-8 Australian, The 51 Authorized Version 30 Avis, Walter S. 27, 134 Bacon, Sir Francis 199 Bähr, Dieter 11 Bahamas 17, 109, 156, 158 Bailey, B.L. 157 Bailey, Nathan 128 Bangla Desh 79, 92 Banim, John 165, 169, 189 Barbados 156 Barnes, William 172 Bautista, M.L. 118 Beckett, Samuel 165 Belfast 172 Belize 21, 29, 156

Bhattacharya, Bhabani 217 Bibby, Roland 229 Bliss, Alan 188 Bonheim, Helmut 175 Botswana 24 Burke, Edmund 165 Burns, Robert 168-9, 190, 234, 237-40 Busch, Wilhelm 220-45 Cameroon 16, 22, 25, 31, 52, 114, 159-60 Canada 13, 19, 21, 27, 60, 64, 74, 96, 108, 111-3, 119, 138-42, 165 Canberry Times, The 116-7 Cape Province 13, 18, 147 Caribbean 13, 20, 21, 29, 30, 33, 108, 125-6, 154-5, 156, 165 Carleton, William 165, 171 Carroll, Lewis 220 Cawdrey, Robert 169 Caxton, William 94 Central America 14 Chaucer, Geoffrey 41 Cheshire, Jenny 12 Chevillet, François 12 Congreve, William 165 Coren, Alan 218 Craigie, W.A. 134, 169 Daniel, Samuel 12-3 Deccan Chronicle 197-8, 205 DeCamp, David 157 Dialect Notes 136 Dolan, Terence P. 173-5, 188 Douglas, Gavin 245 Duke, Antera 159

270

Index of names

Dunbar, William 237 Dustoor, P.E. 30 Edgeworth, Maria 165, 169 Edinburgh 19 England 94, 172 Ezekiel, Nizzim 219 Farquhar, George 165 Fiji 24, 160 Fowler, H.W. 19, 150 France 47, 222 Frankfurter Rundschau 54 Freetown 15, 60, 159 Gambia 22, 24 Germany 21, 47, 64, 84-7, 164-5, 222 Ghana 16, 22, 24, 159 Ghose, K. 215 Goldsmith, Oliver 165 Great Britain 21, 59, 64, 125 Gregory, I.A., Lady 165 Griffin, Gerald 165, 175-6 Groth, Klaus 222, 240 Guyana 21,118 Harris, Joel Chandler 227 Hawaii 125 Heaney, Seamus 167 Hebel, Johann Peter 221-2, 240 Hennings, Paul 229 Henry, P.L. 172 Herder, J.G. von 222 Herning, Derick 221-45 Highsmith, Patricia 118 Hindustan Times Weekly 206 Holder, Maurice 118 Horace Qu. F. 39 Hume, David 169 Independent, The 118 India 13, 15-6, 18, 22-3, 25, 31, 33, 49, 52-3, 56, 62-4, 79, 92, 124, 151-3, 192-219 Indian Nation 207 Ireland 12, 17, 21, 164-91 Israel 23 Jakobsen, Jakob 236 Jamaica 21, 25, 64, 76-7, 156-9 Japan 20,22 Johannesburg 18 Jonson, Ben 229

Joyce, James 164-5, 175, 187, 190 Jussawala, Adit 217 Kachru, Braj B. 36, 192 Kachru, Yamuna 194, 212 Kaplan, Robert B. 37 Keats, John 202 Kenya 16, 22, 24 Kipling, Rudyard 227 Kupwar 28 Kurath, Hans 108 Labov, William 11 Lawrence, D.H. 226 Leland, Ch.G. 218 Lesotho 23 Lever, Ralph 165 Liberia 17, 22, 125, 159 Liverpool 165 London 111, 145, 165, 215 Lowman, Guy 108 Luxembourg 21 Macaulay, Thomas B. 13 McClure, J.D. 221-45 Malaysia 14, 23 Malta 119 Manchester 165 Marsh, G.P. 55 Mauritius 24 Max und Moritz 220-45 Mazzon, Gabriella 12 Meier, H.H. 221-45 Mertz, Henri 228 Milton, Colin 227 Milton, John 15, 20, 30, 193, 202 Montserrat 17, 166 Moore, Thomas 165 Morgan, Sydney, Lady 165 Mulcaster, Richard 245 Mulrine, Steve 221-45 Murison, David 169 Murray, Charles 227 Murray, James A.H. 169 Narayan, R.K. 200 Natal 18 Nauru 23 New England 13,42,112 Newfoundland 12 New Zealand 13, 21, 60, 64, 146, 188

Index of names Nigeria

16, 22, 24-5, 31-2, 49, 62, 64, 124, 159-60 North America 13, 47 Northern Territory 162-3 O'Casey, Sean 167 Onitsha Market Literature 153 Ontario 112 Orsman, Harry 145 Pacific 25, 30, 160-2 Pakistan 79, 92 Pale 166 Papua New Guinea 16, 21, 84, 160-1 Parthasarathy, R. 34, 218 Patterson, D. 172 Patterson, W.H. 172 Philippines 14, 20, 23, 84, 118, 125 Puttenham, George 39, 221 Québec 114, 139 Queensland 160, 162 Rao, Raja 215-7 Rao, V.P. 200 Reuter, Fritz 222, 226 Richards, J.C. 11 Ross, Violet Martin & Somerville, Edith Oenone 165 Roy, R.R. 13 Samoa 160 Sapir, Edward 59 Schiller, Friedrich 221 Schmied, Josef 219 Scotland 12, 16, 21, 41, 64, 102, 164, 168-72 Scott, Sir Walter 165, 168-9, 202, 204, 237 Shakespeare, William 15, 20, 30, 119-20, 183, 193, 245 Shaw, G.B. 165, 167, 240 Sheridan, Richard 165 Shilling, Alison W. 158 Sidhwa, B. 80 Sierra Leone 17, 21-2, 24-5, 64, 159 Singapore 16, 20, 23-4, 62, 64, 125, 153 Singh, K. 217 Solomon Islands 21, 162 Somalia 23

271

Somerset, Lord Charles 18 South Africa 13, 18-9, 21, 24, 47, 64, 745, 111, 147, 188 South Asia 79-83, 125, 151 Southern England 56 Spenser, Edmund 229 Sri Lanka 79, 92 St. Lucia 29 Stanyhurst, Richard 41 Steele, Sir Richard 165 Sterne, Laurence 165 Surinam 25, 155 Swaziland 24 Swift, Jonathan 165, 171 Sydney 18, 58 Synge, J.M. 164-5, 171, 175-6, 184, 187, 189-90 Switzerland 21 Tanzania 14, 23 Thailand 20 Times of India 196 Torres Strait Islands 163 Uganda 24 Ulster 16-7, 172, 174 United States of America 15, 21, 46, 50, 59, 64, 71-3, 111-2, 125, 131-8, 159, 164, 187, 205 Vanuatu 21, 161-2 Vaux, J.H. 145 Wales 12, 172 Walker, John 169 Warrack, Alexander 169, 172 Wenker, Georg 120 West Africa 20, 30-1, 33, 83, 126, 153, 158-60, 188 Western Europe 22, 25 West, Michael 15 West Midlands 16 Wexford 41, 166, 172 Whorf, Benjamin 59 Wilde, Oscar 165, 167 Witherspoon, John 19, 110, 168 Wordsworth, William 15, 202 Yeats, William Butler 165,171 Zimbabwe 24

272

Index of topics INDEX OF TOPICS

No two people will produce identical indexes; mine is intended to point out topics discussed, rather than terms used, in the text. The list is selective in order to prevent it from assuming unmanageable proportions.

Aberdeen (North-Eastern) Scots 220-45 Aborigines 42, 47 abstand 25-6 accent 223 acceptability 21, 28, 33, 62-3, 80, 88, 150, 152, 224, 226, 240 acrolect 25 acronyms 90 ad-hoc formations 64, 68, 79 administration 22, 30, 49, 57, 90, 97, 112, 151, 161, 193-4 advertising 32, 56, 64, 68, 84-6, 193, 198-9, 201-7, 225 African English (AfE) 27 Africanisms 33 Afrikaans 24, 48, 73, 115, 147-50 Afrikaans English 18, 20 air traffic 7 Algonquian 47 amelioration 56-7 American English (AmE) 14, 19-20, 26-7, 41, 46-8, 50, 52, 59, 69, 71-3, 84, 108-9, 125, 128, 130-8, 205 AmE ≠ BrE 93-7, 11, 115, 121, 125-6, 129, 134 American Indians 47 Americanism 19, 111, 128, 131-4 Americanisation 110-1 anglicisation 12-3 Anglo-Irish 14, 167 Anglo-Romani 25 apartheid 24 Arabic 124-5 archaic 18, 41, 44, 132, 208 army 48, 58 articles 29, 218 artificial languages 36 aspect 218

attitudes 18-20, 23, 34-7, 42, 44, 49, 67, 111, 127 ausbau 25-6 Australian English (AusE) 18-9, 26, 28, 42, 47, 50-2, 59, 67, 73-4, 108-9, 114, 116-7, 129, 142-6 Australian Kriol 25 auxiliary language 10, 36 back-formations 50, 90 Bahamian English 158 Bantu (languages) 24, 147-50 BASIC English 15 basilect 25 best authors 44 Bible 161, 193, 226-7 bilingualism 11, 48, 147-50 biology (fauna & flora) 56, 101, 143, 148, 150, 183 Bislama 21, 25,79, 117, 161-2 Black English 11, 131-2, 138 blends 86-7, 91 book language 24, 27 borrowing (loanwords etc.) 30, 35, 46-9, 53, 58-9, 63, 78, 121, 127, 139, 149-51, 173-4, 193 British English (BrE) 20, 27, 59, 81-2, 205 broadcasting 225 broken speech 20, 153, 159 Burnsisms 170-1, 237-9 calques 44, 46, 53, 63, 74, 81, 85, 88, 194 Cameroon Pidgin/English 52, 114-5, 160 Canadian English (CanE) 26-7, 74, 96, 108, 112-4, 119, 138-42 Canadianisms 139-40 'Canadian Raising' 42 cant 145

Index of topics Caribbean creole(s)/English 109-10, 125, 154-5 cartoons 86-7 Chinese Pidgin 218 class distinction 11,43 clippings 51, 66, 73, 90 Cockney 43, 58 code-mixing 28, 49, 74 code-switching 30, 74, 159 collocation 30 colloquial 44, 48, 50, 53, 72-3, 145, 170, 210, 223 colonial English 18, 74 colonial history 36 colonial lag 41, 111, 118, 130, 191, 194 Commonwealth 13 communication 11, 33, 59, 103 competence 23-4, 27, 61, 81 compounds 46, 50-3, 71, 74, 78, 80, 88-9 conservative 39-41, 59-60, 70 continuum 22, 25, 45, 155-7, 223 convergence 28, 39, 111-2, 114, 228 conversation 68 cookery recipes 214 copiousness 67, 119 core vocabulary 36 corpus 34, 195, 219 correct(ness) 11, 33, 44, 69, 111, 128, 147 corrupt(ion) 18-9, 23, 128, 131, 133, 147, 224 creative writing 32 creativity 68 creole (& pidgin) 11, 20-2, 27, 30, 33, 39, 45, 48, 53-4, 75-9, 83, 89, 1256, 153-63 cultural history 135, 140, 144, 148, 158, 165, 175, 183, 187 decorum 67, 193, 224 decreolisation 25, 46, 155 dedications 199-200 denotation 43, 55 density 235-6 derivation 46, 53 deviance 29, 33-5, 44, 62-3, 66, 79, 192, 202, 218

273

dialects 25, 39, 97, 108, 128, 135, 183-4, 221-3,229 dialectalisation 39, 102 dialect dictionary 128, 136-8, 141-2, 149 dialect literature 165, 220-45 dialectology 11, 27, 40, 93-107, 166 diaries 149 dictionaries 19, 36, 49, 63-4, 66-8, 70, 98-9, 114, 116-7, 124-63, 164-91, 236 diglossia 45, 48, 155 diminutives 51,59,70,73,75,89 divergence 42-3, 69, 71, 93, 99, 108, 111, 133 Dutch 14, 18, 125, 156 Early Modern English 64, 67-9 educated usage 19 education/schools 15, 22, 24, 102, 112, 154, 170, 223 electronic communication 7 elegance 69 emigrants 40, 42 encyclopedic data 144, 150 English as a foreign language (EFL) 7, 14, 20-4, 45, 61-92 English as an international language (EIL) 36 English as a native language (ENL) 21, 30-7, 61-92 English as a second dialect (ESD) 21, 45, 48 English as a second language (ESL) 7, 14, 20-4, 33-7, 49, 61-92, 150-5 English for special purposes (ESP) 36, 125 English as a world language (EWL, IntE) 36-7 environment 55 equivalents 94-9, 115 essay writing 212-3 ethnic diversity 24, 27, 148-9 etymology 46, 68, 78, 127, 137, 157, 159 euphemism 57 euphony 63, 68 exclusive dictionary (of -isms) 126, 128, 187-8

274

Index of topics

expository prose 31-2, 34, 53, 200-1, 223 expressive functions 43, 56, 59 facetious 51, 82, 85-7, 92, 184-5 field work 137, 149, 173-4 films 20, 30, 58, 111,205 folk etymology 82 folk speech 108, 112, 136 football report 31 foreignisms 166, 187 fossilisation 44, 70, 118, 227 franglais 40, 54, 84 French 12-4, 19, 22, 24-5, 54, 67, 83, 1145, 125, 139, 156, 161-2 frontier society 60 Gaelic 48, 69, 165-9, 173, 186, 224 German 40, 54, 55, 84-7, 101, 115, 120, 125, 154, 225 Ghanaian English 20 Glaswegian 220-45 glossaries/vocabularies 126, 131-3, 139, 147, 151-2, 175, 187 glottal stop 43 grammar 36, 152, 159, 161-2 grammar books 15, 68 grammaticality 61 H-variety 224, 229 'half-language' 102 handbooks 11-2 Hawaiian English 20 headlines 66, 89 heteronyms 99-123, 154, 167 Hindi 63, 80, 82, 152-3, 193, 196 historical dictionaries 133-6, 139-41, 1434, 146, 148-9, 150, 152, 157, 187 historical (socio-) linguistics 10, 192, 222 homogeneity 10, 14, 28, 108, 127 homonymy 87, 93 homophony 26, 53 humour 171, 185, 225, 243-4 hybrids 74-5, 80, 83-4, 89 ideal native speaker 11 identity 11, 19, 27, 60, 70, 111, 133, 141, 150, 222 idiom 218 immigrants (cf. settlers) 19, 30, 125, 1389, 146

inclusive dictionaries 133-4, 141, 144-5, 149, 188-90 Indian English (IndE) 20, 25, 28, 44, 49, 52-3, 90-1, 149, 192-212 Indianisms 33 independence 19-20, 23, 28 indigenous languages 44, 49 inferiority complex 15, 44 inflexion 15, 39, 43, 46, 75 innovations 39-60 input 30, 193 insecurity 75 integrative function 15, 36 intelligibility 34, 37, 62, 81, 128, 156, 160, 197 interlanguage 30 Irish English (IrE) 26, 41, 48, 142-3, 16491 Irishisms 167-8 isogloss 94, 108-10, 114 isolation 108 Jamaican Creole/English 76-7, 90, 157-8 Krio 15, 21-2, 25, 60, 77-8, 159-60 Kriol (Australia) 162-3 Lallans 220-45 language acquisition 11,30 language contact 29, 42, 47, 55, 82 language in society 61, 91 language planning 23, 36 language shift 24, 33, 243 language teaching 35-6 Lankan English 28 Latin 15, 63, 67-8, 72, 83, 124 Latinate 31,71, 194, 197, 218 law 30, 70, 97, 170 letter 32, 209-12 Letzebuergsch 224 levelling 18, 27, 42, 102-3, 127 lexical fields 47, 115 lexical gaps 67, 93, 121 lexifier language 46, 75 lexis 39, 43 Liberian English 20, 125, 159 linguistic theory 28 literary language/literature 33-4, 67-8, 70, 165, 168-71, 175, 189-90, 193, 214-9, 221, 223, 237-9

Index of topics loanwords see borrowing localisation 241-2 London English/norms 67, 103-4, 111, 128, 142, 221 Low German 224, 226, 240 malapropisms 76 Maori 146 maps 105-7, 137 matrimonial advertisements 56 media 20, 22, 112, 161, 223, 225 melting-pot 42 metaphor 30, 115, 201, 203 Middle English (ME) 101, 124 Middle Scots 221, 234, 244-5 minority language 222, 224, 245 missionaries 159-60 'misuse' of register 30-2, 194, 213 mixed language 28, 42, 44, 84, 89 modals 41 multilingual(ism) 19, 23-4, 29 names 232-3 national character 59 nationalism 224 national language 22-3, 133, 186 native language 28 native speaker 7 nativisation/acculturation 30, 32-3, 91 neologisms 46, 92, 185 New Englishes 39-60, 192 newspapers 20, 30, 49, 65-6, 81, 111, 165, 190, 193, 196-8, 226, 242 New Zealand English (NZE) 18, 26, 28, 108, 146 Nigerian English/Pidgin (Nig(P)E) 44 norm 14, 18-20, 27, 33-5, 37, 42, 49, 613, 65, 67-8, 70, 85, 91, 150, 152, 154, 161,219 Norwegian 124 nostalgia 223, 225, 243 novel 31 nuclear English 15 obituary 32, 207-8, 225 obsolescence/loss 39, 48, 58, 140, 177, 228-9 official language 18, 23-4 Old English 101, 124 onomasiology 82, 121

275

onomatopoeia 76, 231-2 Oxford English Dictionary (OED) 19, 128-30, 134-5, 143-4, 149, 153, 157, 175 Pakistani English 203-4, 212-3 paraphrase 79 parody 218-9 Pennsylvania Dutch 224 philology 10 Philippine English (PhilE) 20, 84, 118, 125 phonology 26, 45 pidgin see creole pleonastic 77-8, 81, 218 politics 23, 57-8, 148 polyfunctionality 46, 76, 78, 83 polysemy 93, 96, 104 pop music 20, 30, 58, 205 Portuguese 14, 125, 152 pragmatic (values, needs) 15, 33, 36, 192 prescriptive 15, 19, 33, 50, 67, 69, 73, 85, 108, 150, 192 prestige 18, 26, 31, 35, 39, 83, 102, 160, 169, 224, 245 productivity 51, 70-2 pronunciation 42-3, 62 provincialisms 132 publisher 33, 36, 215 puns 85-7 'pure' (language, dialect) 40-1 purism 59, 68 Puritan 57 quasi-English 85 /t/ (rhotic) 26 radio 20, 30, 225 Rastafari 53 Received Pronunciation (RP) 7, 42 readers (of dialect texts) 226-8, 230, 242 reconstruction 40, 229 reduction 228 reduplication 53, 75-6, 78 reference 94-5 regionalisms 102, 129 register 30-32, 80, 194-5 relativity 59 religion 60, 161, 207 research 10, 20, 61, 65, 120, 130, 144

276

Index of topics

respectable 11, 18 retentions/survivals 39, 55, 58, 70, 115, 127-8, 131, 174 review 32 rhetoric 37, 61 rhymes 233-4 rhyming slang 50, 73 Romance 40 Royalists 19 saturation 47 Scandinavian 101 Scots/Scottish 25, 41, 48, 69-71, 96-7, 128-9, 168-71, 220-45 Scotticism 19, 131, 169 Scottish English (ScE) 26, 48 self-confidence 12-3 semantic change 54-8, 63, 67 serialisation 83 settlers/settlements 12, 17-8,47, 112, 165 Shetlandic 220-45 simplification 36, 39 Singaporean English (SgE) 20, 23, 153 slang 58, 135, 138, 140, 143, 145 sociolinguistics 11, 18, 26, 28-9, 37, etc. Solomon Pijin 21, 25, 162 South African English (SAfE) 18, 20, 26, 47-8, 58, 73-5, 147-50 South Asian English (SAsE) 28, 79-83, 119, 151-3 Spanish 14, 125, 156 speakers of English 24, 84, 193 speech community 29, 94, 97, 99, 108 spelling 157, 159, 162, 177 spoken varieties 46, 142, 155, 157, 228 Sprachinsel dialect 40 spread/imposition 7, 10, 12-6, 40, 102 Sranan 25 standard (language) 102, 221-3 standardisation 26-7,112,224 statistics 29, 43, 66, 87, 137, 195 stereotype 34, 72, 126, 169-70, 184, 186, 218-9

stigma 39, 49, 186-7, 222 style 28, 30, 33, 95, 104, 115, 129, 152, 184-5, 192, 215, 230, 239-40 suffix 89-90 Survey of Canadian English 108, 112-3 Swiss German 224 synonyms 93-4, 108, 112, 118 syntax 35, 43, 45, 68 Tamil (English) 28, 196 tautonyms 97 technology 49, 58, 111-2, 119-20, 151 tenses 218 terminology 57, 75 tests 62 text 30-32 text type 30-32, 62, 192-219, 224-5 thesaurus 130 Tok Pisin 21, 25, 46, 78-9, 84, 160-1 tolerance 36 Torres Strait Broken 163 translation (cf. Bible) 161, 193, 220-45 transparent 46-7, 53, 66, 69, 77, 81-3, 88 transplanted languages 30, 40, 62, 71-5, 124-63, 215 Ulster Scots 166-7 urbanisation 15, 223 usage 39, 132, 141, 145, 150, 152, 154 U.S. English see AmE utility 13, 15 vagueness 46, 94 variables 29 variation 62, 193, 239 varieties 25, 27 vitality 70-1, 223, 242-3 West African English (WAfE) 27, 83, 153-4, 158-60 word-formation 30, 45, 49-54, 61-92, 234 written language 14, 21, 159 Yiddish 224 zero-derivation 50, 68, 72, 76, 78, 83, 8990