Pam Peters and Kate Burridge's edited volume, Exploring the Ecology of World Englishes in the Twenty-first Century: Language, Society and Culture, marks a critical turn in the study of World Englishes. The contributors to the volume move beyond simply describing variation in World Englishes and attempt to explain this variation in terms of the specific cultural contexts in which the respective Englishes develop. The book's seventeen chapters focus primarily on varieties of English spoken in the Indo-Pacific region, although two chapters, by Bertus van Rooy (chapter 3) and Christiane Meierkord and Bebwa Isingoma (chapter 6), address South African and Ugandan Englishes respectively.
In the introductory chapter, Peters and Burridge provide an outline of the volume's aim, namely, to explore the ‘interplay between the distinctive features of a regional English and its ecolinguistic environment’ (p. 1) and give a succinct overview of the main theoretical framework guiding the work – Schneider's platform paper exploring cultural evidence in corpora. However, the editors’ introduction does not provide a clear idea of how core concepts such as linguistic ecology are understood in the book. More importantly, the editors do not adequately define or interrogate the notion of culture. Admittedly, as Schneider notes in his contribution, culture is ‘a rather versatile, perhaps fuzzy notion that may relate to different objects, concepts and practices’ (p. 15), but because the editors do not address the range of approaches to culture which are present in the volume, an important thread that ties the contributions together is left loose.
Edgar W. Schneider's platform paper, ‘Reflections of cultures in corpus texts: Focus on the Indo-Pacific region’, presents the theoretical framework upon which the book's remaining chapters are built. Schneider examines the ways in which aspects of culture can be attested quantitatively, and the great strength of his arguments lies in the use of corpora to examine and substantiate previous cultural research from a linguistic perspective, e.g. the use of Chinese Cultural Connection (1987) as the basis of his examination of Chinese values. Schneider identifies three nexuses along which language and culture can be examined: cultural terms and objects, cultural dimensions, and the impact of culture on structural aspects of language. With regard to the first nexus, Schneider's finding that cultural terms associated with the L1s seems somewhat to be expected, since lexical borrowing is a feature of contact between English and indigenous languages. Schneider's arguments towards the second nexus are more convincing; he demonstrates a relationship between the use of first-person singular pronouns in individualist and collectivist cultures, as well as forms of address in societies with greater and lesser power differences. Within the third nexus, in which aspects of culture are present in the grammar, Schneider explores the use of syntactic structures such as passives and impersonal constructions. The structural examples do not appear to simply be instances of cross-linguistic influence but quite tenable cases of structures which have arisen to fulfil pragmatic expectations in the respective societies.
In chapter 3, ‘Reflections of Afrikaans in the English short stories of Herman Charles Bosman’, Bertus van Rooy examines how Bosman's use of Afrikaans in his short stories reflects culturally specific objects and practices. Van Rooy's use of a keyword analysis to create a wordlist of terms that can be searched for means that he is able to compellingly argue that the Afrikaans features found are indeed unique to Bosman's writing in the stories about Oom Schalk. Furthermore, van Rooy's close analysis of the semantics of think in his corpus provides the kind of fine-grained analysis that is often missing from corpus analytic approaches. At the same time, given that van Rooy draws both his Bosman corpus and his baseline comparative corpus of fiction from the same period, it may have been worthwhile to draw on the latter corpus to better substantiate claims that forms such as ‘topicalization in combination with verb-second word order [… is] archaic at best in English’ (p. 59), and not, say, a feature of South African literary writing in the early twentieth century.
Loy Lising's ‘Susmaryosep! Lexical evidence of cultural influence in Philippine English’ is the fourth chapter in the volume. Rooted in theories of code-switching, and particularly the notions of core and cultural borrowing, Lising uses the written component of ICE-Philippines to explore the nature of the elements which receive the <indig> markup in the corpus. Lising's analysis is enriched by the author's familiarity with not just Philippine English but also the different languages with which it comes into contact, and the resulting analysis of the <indig> markup is nuanced, particularly with regard to Lising's treatment of indigenous words in different text types (pp. 70–3). However, Lising's writing sometimes assumes a readership who shares a considerable amount of sociocultural and historical background knowledge, such as the reference to voyages on which ‘friendships were forged’ (p. 77). At other times (p. 79), she does attempt to fill readers’ lack of knowledge.
Chapter 5, ‘Cultural keywords in Indian English’ by Pam Peters, is a sophisticated chapter which highlights how dictionaries and corpora can be used to carry out sound research on lexical and semantic change. Peters makes innovative use of dictionaries of Indian English from the nineteenth and twenty-first centuries to trace the longevity of cultural keywords. The dictionary data is supplemented by online data from the 96-million-word Indian English section of the GloWbE corpus. Peters’ impressive analysis tracks not only the individual lexical items, but also changes in the semantics of words over time, as in her analysis of sahib.
The final chapter in part I is ‘Lexicopragmatics between cultural heritage and exonormative second language acquisition: Address terms, greetings and discourse markers in Ugandan English’ by Christiane Meierkord and Bebwa Isingoma. The authors take a register approach, comparing the spoken and written components of ICE-Uganda to a third corpus of online Ugandan English, Web-UG, the inclusion of which is particularly welcome. However, the authors provide only raw frequencies, rather than normalised frequencies, for corpora of different sizes, which makes it difficult to compare variation across registers reliably. One insight arising from the chapter is that in both greetings and terms of address, users of Ugandan English have a clear preference for English forms, though with meanings specific to the Ugandan context. The analysis of greetings is based on semi-structured ethnographic interviews the authors conducted, but the discussion (pp. 114–15) does not consider the effect of the interview situation on the use of greetings; if the interviewers did not speak any Ugandan languages, there would be little motivation for participants to use a language other than English.
The three chapters in the second part of the book focus on aspects of Schneider's second nexus. In chapter 7, Sarah Lynch, Eva Kuske and Dominique B. Hess explore kinship terminology in English spoken in Guam, Saipan and Kosrae. The authors start by describing family relationships in each of the three islands, and go on to explore how the frequency of specific kinship terms seems to reflect family structures there. In Guam, grandparents are an integral part of family and community structure, and the Guam data accounts for the greatest percentage of references to grandparents and grandchildren of the three corpora. Similarly, adoption within families is quite common in Kosrae, and this dataset accounts for the most uses of adoption. The authors are self-critical and reflective, considering the effect of their method of data collection and issues such as priming on the results – an insight that is not unimportant since the interviews seem to have concentrated on topics like family ties and traditions, in which kinship terms will inevitably be discussed. This chapter demonstrates how good ethnographic work can lend critical insights to corpus linguistics, particularly when it comes to looking for evidence of culture in the corpora.
Hannah Hedegard's chapter, ‘Somewhere between Australia and Malaysia and “I” and “we”: Verbalising culture on the Cocos (Keeling) Islands’ (CKI), investigates how aspects of community, notably individualism and collectivism and kinship, are encoded in the English of CKI speakers. On one level, her results for the use of first-person personal pronouns seem comparable to Schneider's (chapter 2) results for Singapore, though slightly lower than Schneider's results for India. Upon closer examination, she finds that there is age-related variation: younger speakers use more individualist terms, while older speakers make use of more collectivist and family-related vocabulary. Linguistic corpora are often relied on to trace language variation and change, but Hedegard's examination of generational differences in individualist and collectivist terms highlights how they can be used to track cultural changes, too.
The final chapter of part II on the second nexus is Kathleen Ahrens and Winnie Huiheng Zeng's contribution, ‘Expressing concepts metaphorically in English editorials in the Sinosphere’. The pair examine conceptual metaphors related to democracy in a corpus of newspapers from Beijing, Hong Kong and Taipei. Among the interesting findings reported is the fact that Beijing newspapers used democracy with reference to elections in the United States, while in Hong Kong editorials, democracy refers to democracy in Hong Kong, and Taipei journalists use democracy with reference to Taiwan more generally. The chapter demonstrates how efforts to look for evidence of culture in language can both satiate academic curiosity and serve the wider community, since the status of democracy in Beijing, Hong Kong and Taipei is also of concern to global economic and political leaders.
The third and final part of the book comprises eight chapters which broadly fall within Schneider's third nexus. Part III opens with Sarah Buschfeld's paper, ‘L1 Singapore English: The influence of ethnicity and input’. Buschfeld examines the effect of ethnicity and cross-linguistic influence on the acquisition of English as an L1 by children of different ethnicities in Singapore, paying attention to a range of phonological and grammatical features. Her analysis is based, on the one hand, on the careful qualitative analysis of a rich dataset of children's language, and, on the other, on a sophisticated quantitative analysis in which features of the children's language (e.g. the use of zero subjects) are systematically compared not only across children of different ethnicities in Singapore, but also to a comparative dataset of British children's language. Buschfeld accounts for some variation in her corpus as possible evidence of an unstable emerging system (p. 205) but does not consider a likely alternative: Standard L1 Singaporean English will not be identical to Standard British or American English, precisely because of broader linguistic and cultural factors in the ecology in which the varieties develop.
In chapter 11, ‘Across three Kachruvian circles with two parts-of-speech: Nouns and verbs in ENL, ESL and EFL varieties’, Tobias Bernaisch and Sandra Götz problematise the distinction between English as a Native Language (ENL), English as a Second Language (ESL) and English as a Foreign Language (EFL) in postcolonial settings. The Kachruvian three-circle model is fundamental to the discipline of World Englishes, and, though previous authors have commented on the heterogeneity within Kachru's circles (e.g. Bruthiaux Reference Bruthiaux2003), Bernaisch and Götz’ chapter provides empirical evidence of the nature of this heterogeneity, at least with regard to nominal and verbal phrases. At the same time, in showing a high degree of similarity between EFL and ENL varieties, the chapter underscores the fact that, in this regard, Kachru's model still quite accurately predicts what happens: expanding circle speakers rely on inner circle varieties for norms of language use in English.
Chapter 12, ‘Modality, rhetoric and regionality in English editorials in the Sinosphere’ by Pam Peters, Tobias Bernaisch and Kathleen Ahrens, draws on the same corpus used in chapter 9, though this time to look at modal verbs. The authors link the frequency in the use of specific modals to aspects of culture in the Sinosphere; for example, the relatively infrequent use of would, could and might is linked to Chinese cultural preferences for the expression of certainty. The analysis takes a top-down approach to the analysis of modals, which allows for results to be compared with similar studies. However, this approach means that the researchers do not allow for the possibility that modal verbs may have different semantic features in different contexts, as Deuber et al. (Reference Deuber, Biewer, Hackert, Hilbert, Hundt and Gut2012) have previously suggested. It may have been more productive to code the function of the individual modal verbs according to the meanings conveyed in context rather than assuming that the modals retrieved were necessarily performing the assumed rhetorical functions.
Chapter 13 by Kate Burridge and Carolin Biewer sometimes toes the line between linguistic anthropology and nineteenth-century exoticism and orientalism, which makes it at times uncomfortable to read. For instance, reference to ‘unusual morphosyntactic features’ (p. 260), ‘unEnglish-looking features’ (p. 272) or ‘more eccentric characteristics of pronominal usage’ (p. 264) gives the writing the occasional sense of othering of the speech community, and alienates readers who may not identify with the authors’ viewpoint. This is exacerbated by the fact that many of the claims seem to be based on stereotypes and folk knowledge, such as ‘Australians have always regarded their colloquial idiom as a significant part of their cultural identity’ (p. 263). Despite these concerns, Burridge and Biewer's ‘Where grammar meets culture: Pronominal systems in Australasia and the South Pacific revisited’ contains a solid exploration of how the use of pronouns expresses group and individual identity in the Englishes of Fiji, Samoa and the Cook Islands. It is a careful qualitative analysis of the uses of we, we all, they and I, and is a good example of how corpus data can be used to carry out qualitative and insightful analyses.
Chapter 14, Ian G. Malcolm's ‘Decolonisation and neo-colonialism in Aboriginal education’, takes a critical approach to the analysis of Aboriginal English (AbE). Malcolm uses Schneider's notions of indicator terms and indicator structures to argue that the adoption and adaptation of English by Aboriginal Australians was an act of counter-colonisation rather than colonial domination. This analysis gives speakers of AbE considerable agency, and Malcolm utilises it to advocate for the rights of AbE speakers in educational settings. The chapter is a powerful argument for how understanding cultural aspects embedded in linguistic structures can be used for the benefit of the communities in which researchers carry out their work.
Adam Smith, Minna Korhonen, Haidee Kotze and Bertus van Rooy's exploration of ‘Modal and semi-modal verbs of obligation in the Australian, New Zealand and British Hansard: 1901–2015’ is the focus of chapter 15. Although modals in inner circle Englishes have received considerable attention in previous research, Smith et al.'s chapter is significant because it takes the description of linguistic changes in a particular setting (parliament) and attempts to link linguistic developments to social, cultural and historical developments, e.g. self-reliance, and expressions of national identity. One area in which this is done especially well is in accounting for the peak in the use of must in 1965 in the Australian and New Zealand Hansards (pp. 309–10) by linking it to the specific event of Britain's application to join the European Economic Community and the effect this could have had on Australia and New Zealand.
Chapter 16 also looks at Australian English, with Isabelle Burke and Kate Burridge's contribution, ‘Privileging informality: Cultural influences on the structural patterning of Australian English’. In this chapter, the authors examine taboo language and the use of X-all constructions such as bugger-all as negators in Australian English. The dataset for this chapter is broad ranging: the UWA Corpus of English in Australia, the Old Bailey Corpus and Google N-grams, as well as a grammaticality judgement test and the Oxford English Dictionary, and the resultant analysis is, as a consequence, rich and multi-faceted, considering aspects of linguistic theory (Jesperson's Cycle), the nature of the form in the historical input varieties, and sociological insights into Australian culture. These serve to strengthen Burke and Burridge's argument linking the development X-all to societal projections of informality in Australia.
With ‘The Auckland Voices Project: Language change in a changing city’, Peters and Burridge end their volume on a high note. Miriam Meyerhoff, Elaine Ballard, Helen Charters, Alexandra Birchfield and Catherine I. Watson's Auckland Voices Project is an important dataset for the study of English in New Zealand because it includes the speech of both immigrant and non-immigrant groups, a practice which, as the authors note, is often avoided in sociolinguistic study (p. 347). However, in a globalised world increasingly shaped by mobility, the inclusion of migrant speech as part of the community builds on a precedent set by other field-defining works such Cheshire et al.'s (Reference Cheshire, Kerswill, Fox and Torgersen2011) work on Multicultural London English. In addition to this, Meyerhoff et al.'s chapter brings World Englishes research in line with current research trends in sociolinguistics more generally.
In Exploring the Ecology of World Englishes in the Twenty-first Century, Peters and Burridge have laid an important foundation for the future of World Englishes research. Although the volume concentrates largely on varieties of English used in the Indo-Pacific, the methods used and the concerns raised are applicable to all varieties of English. Corpora prove to be a flexible resource, not only for traditional foci of World Englishes research, such as morphosyntactic variation, but also for exploring traces of culture enregistered in language. World Englishes research should more carefully consider how the linguistic ecology contributes to the development of varieties of English.
