Indian Englishes in the Twenty-First Century is the fifth member of the new Elements in World Englishes series. It is the second Element to address unity and diversity in Indian English(es) after Wiltshire (Reference Wiltshire2020), but the first to focus on lexis and morphosyntax. In terms of length and scope, an Element stands between traditional research articles and typical academic books. Leuckert, Lange, Bernaisch and Yurchenko’s extensive corpus-based and corpus-driven exploration of regional variation in Indian newspapers is an ideal fit for this format, in addition to constituting a new important benchmark in the study of Indian Englishes.
The field of World Englishes has a strong focus on nation-states, as illustrated by the fact that a large number of varieties are named after the independent country they are spoken in (e.g. Jamaican English, Nigerian English, Australian English, Indian English). This is admittedly in great part because a territory’s newly obtained independence from its British or American colonizer plays an important role in the emergence and establishment of a ‘new’ English. The perennial problem with named varieties (as with named languages), however, is that naming contributes to the instinctive but false impression that boundaries between national varieties are discrete, and that a territory must have an appreciable degree of internal homogeneity. Such a generalization is especially problematic in the case of India, because the country is characterized by a degree of linguistic and cultural diversity that is difficult to overstate. Most studies of ‘Indian English’ to date therefore encounter problems of definition and representativeness when it comes to describing English as it is used within India’s borders – this lack of a ‘big picture’ was pointed out again recently by Sridhar (Reference Sridhar, Bolton, Botha and Kirkpatrick2020: 254). With this volume, the authors take up the challenge and make room for the idea of regional Indian Englishes by asking ‘to what extent can we use the term “Indian English” …, and to what extent is the plural “Indian Englishes” (IndEs) more appropriate?’ (p. 1).
The Element consists of six sections or chapters and an appendix. Following a short introduction (pp. 1–3), section 2 gives an overview of India’s superdiversity (pp. 3–16). It provides a description of the place of English within the linguistic ecology of India, followed by several individual subsections dedicated to linguistic policies and broad social, educational and political regional differences between the North, North East, Central, South, East and West, as well as the centrally governed Union Territories. The section concludes by pondering the likelihood of the emergence of a national standard. These considerations are inevitably informed by Edgar Schneider’s Dynamic Model (Reference Schneider2007) and the presumed position of Indian English at stage 4, endonormative stabilization. Refreshingly, though, the authors are not obsessed with ‘placing’ the variety within the model or testing the model itself but focus on describing what regional and national norms may look like with regard to lexis and morphosyntax.
Section 3 introduces the newspaper corpora which form the basis of the study, namely SAVE2020 (South Asian Varieties of English Corpus) and CORINNE (Corpus of Regional Indian Newspaper Englishes) (pp. 16–23). The Indian component of SAVE2020 amounts to three million words sampled from recent issues of The Times of India and The Statesman, which are widely distributed national newspapers and are believed to reflect national norms or to play a role in their creation. CORINNE is an impressive corpus of regional newspapers representing each of the seven Indian regions introduced in section 2: the North, North East, Central, South, East, and West regions, plus Union Territories. CORINNE therefore allows for comparisons between regions and, together with SAVE2020, between the regional and national press. It is worth noting that with over 27 million words, CORINNE is one of the largest existing corpora of Indian Englishes and certainly the largest corpus compiled with the explicit aim of representing regional variation in the Indian press. This Element is the first publication to make use of CORINNE in its entirety. Section 3 concludes with a short introduction to the features investigated, that is, a mix of previously documented features and others uncovered over the course of exploring the corpora. The hypothesis underlying both the choice of corpora and the selection of features is that the regional newspapers making up CORINNE may be more open to local, innovative and emerging (i.e. more vernacular, or ‘mesolectal’, in the authors’ terms) features compared to the bigger national newspapers.
Section 4 contains analyses of three lexical features, reported in as many subsections (pp. 23–47). It consists of a study of spelling variation, a multidimensional analysis of register and an account of lexical innovations found in the corpora. The analyses and results are summarized in turn in the next paragraphs.
To investigate regional spelling variation, the authors consider variants with and without a (e.g. aesthetic), e (e.g. eyeing) and o (e.g. homoeopathy), with or without double ll (e.g. labelled), with Latinate or English suffixes (e.g. syllabi ), and with and without punctuation after abbreviations (e.g. Prof.). Though they also briefly cover the usual American and British spelling pairs (e.g. color vs. colour), the focus is not on the corpus components’ orientation towards these extraterritorial norms, but on more subtle choices beyond American–British dichotomies. The results point to a great degree of heterogeneity within and across the individual components, with the exception of an almost categorical preference for Latinate suffixes and a consistent preference for abbreviations without punctuation. Following the analysis of the frequencies of all variants, a cluster analysis is applied to establish which regions pattern similarly. The Central region is found to be a sort of outlier, while the clustering of the components representing the South, North East and East are interpreted as hinting at a potential emerging spelling standard that is, however, not yet established nationwide.
Next, a multidimensional analysis (MDA) of register is applied to the corpus data. As the authors explain, the MDA ranks text types according to six different dimensions or characteristics based on mainly lexical items (e.g. the frequency of nouns and adjectives, of certain verb tenses, modal verbs, etc.) The results from the MDA and subsequent cluster analysis show that one group of components (North, North East, South and Union Territories) tends to occupy the middle ranks for most dimensions, whereas the Central component stands out as a particularly ‘fact-oriented collection of texts that does not seek to actively engage with or manipulate its audience’ (p. 42). Hence, the patterning of the components is consistent with regional differences previously noted in the spelling analysis.
The last subsection of section 4 introduces previously undocumented lexical innovations. The authors uncover innovations by taking the corpora’s word lists as a starting point, then eliminating proper names as well as known items by checking each item against entries in the Oxford English Dictionary, other corpus data and Indian English reference works. Of the 17,357 (!) remaining words, those with derivational affixes are retained. This method uncovers five then-unrecorded items: crackerless (a celebration without firecrackers), impleadment (taking an issue to court), saffronisation (the implementation of right-wing nationalist agendas), saffronise (see saffronisation) and telecaller (someone who makes phone calls representing a company). Though these innovations are very rare even in these sizeable corpora, the authors note that while most components exhibit at least one of these new words – with the West subcorpus and SAVE2020 using almost all of them – the Central region includes none. This again is consistent with the distinctions emerging from the spelling and MDA analyses.
Section 5 is the longest chapter of the Element (pp. 47–71). It presents analyses of four morphosyntactic features: the treatment of mass nouns as count nouns, the focus markers only and itself, the use of about after certain verbs and intrusive as. They are briefly summarized in turn in the following paragraphs.
The employment of mass nouns as count nouns in Indian English has been noted several times before, but whether they have undergone recent developments or vary regionally is not well established. The authors’ investigation of the syntax of 28 variably countable nouns finds that their relative frequency in SAVE2020 (i.e. national newspapers) amounts to only half that in CORINNE overall. This is consistent with the hypothesis that regional newswriting may exhibit more ‘native’ features. In individual regions, their relative frequency varies widely too. Though the words likely to be treated as count nouns are similar across the components (e.g. agitation, evidence…), the authors note the unexpected presence of cash, applause, violence, slang and employment as count nouns. It indicates that the treatment of mass nouns as count nouns is somewhat productive and goes beyond the select lexical items typically accounted for in other descriptions of Indian Englishes.
Similarly to variably countable nouns, the Indian English-specific use of only and itself as focus markers has been remarked upon by previous research. In SAVE2020 and CORINNE, markers only and itself are very rare, and these two corpora do not differ in their employment of the markers, at least in terms of statistical significance. Among CORINNE’s individual components, regional differences reach statistical significance and appear more pronounced for itself than only.
The third feature analyzed in section 5 is the use of about after verbs that do not take this preposition in standardized varieties but may do so in Indian English. As the authors note, these verbs are overwhelmingly verbs of saying, e.g. discuss about, mention about. Based on criteria such as minimum frequency and representation in both CORINNE and SAVE2020, the authors focus on the normalized frequencies of twelve verbs and the relative frequencies of the five most frequent among those (discuss, mention, highlight, sensitise, comment). Although the variants with about are clearly minor and rare compared to about-less alternatives, the authors observe that verb + about is overall more frequent in CORINNE than in SAVE2020, again in line with the initial hypothesis.
The last feature investigated in the study is ‘intrusive as’, or the use of as before object complements (e.g. I term her as a linguist), perhaps in order to explicitly mark complements. Here, the analysis is restricted to three verbs – term, deem, dub – representing different usage frequencies. The difference in frequency of these individual verbs between CORINNE and SAVE2020 does not reach statistical significance. However, and perhaps surprisingly, the variants term as and dub as are outright preferred to their as-less equivalents in both corpora. By breaking down these frequencies per region, the authors establish that intrusive as is more frequent in southern states compared to northern ones. They point out that this distribution in the south correlates with the presence of languages like Tamil and Telugu, which have a quotative that serves to label and name. Though an explanation related to language contact is appealing, the authors also note that there are sensible cognitive reasons for overt marking and redundancy in discourse.
In sum, the analyses presented in sections 4 and 5 take full advantage of the opportunities presented by the size and makeup of the corpora, in spite of the considerable amount of data to manually process. The analyses of lexical innovations, mass/count nouns, focus markers, verb + about and intrusive as, in particular, highlight the benefits of CORINNE and SAVE 2020: arguably, it is the large size of CORINNE that enables the recovery of these low-frequency items in newspaper language. That said, it is also obvious that the low frequency of some items in individual corpus components often prevents strong conclusions regarding regional variation. It is appreciable that despite the use of diverse and advanced statistical and visualization methods (bar graphs, tables, tanglegrams, association plots, maps, etc.), the Element keeps nitty gritty methodological details to a minimum to leave maximal space for examples from the data and relevant interpretation.
The conclusion offered in section 6 summarizes the results and circles back to the question of the degree of unity and diversity among the Englishes represented in the data (pp. 72–7). Differences between regional Englishes represented in CORINNE and the national press represented by SAVE2020 stand out but are also unequivocally quantitative rather than categorical. It indicates that there is an important degree of unity in Indian newspapers, without a particular region being the leader or originator of these norms. This is not to say that there are no recognizable regional patterns. Based on amalgamated distance matrixes for each feature studied and each corpus component, the authors distinguish three clusters, with the Central region being an outlier, the North, North East and Union Territories being alike, and the West, South, East and SAVE2020 forming another cluster. Importantly, the authors note that these clusters do not especially correlate with the distribution of Indo-Aryan and Dravidian languages in these respective regions. The authors suggest that a process of ‘supralocalization’ may be underway, whereby norms are being negotiated and features leveled across regions along the path to standardization.
With this Element, Leuckert, Lange, Bernaisch and Yurchenko lay the groundwork to take the study of Indian Englishes to the next level, tackling the ‘big picture’ problem highlighted by all previous work on Indian Englishes. Their work will hopefully steer future scholarship in World Englishes towards serious engagement with regional variation. It goes without saying that this turn must also include confronting the difficult challenge of diversifying our sources of data in order to go beyond newspapers. With regards to the documentation of regional variation in Indian Englishes and almost everywhere else, nearly all the work remains to be done, but this volume is a perfect start.
