Educated Spoken English in Jamaica: Phonetische/ lexikogrammatische Normierung und soziolinguistischer Status
Final Report Abstract
The fascinating linguistic landscape of Jamaica has been well charted by linguists. However, most scholars have focussed on the origins, structure and status of Jamaican Creole, the island's mass vernacular - at the expense of Jamaican English, the emerging local variety of Standard English, which was assumed to differ from British English, the former colonial norm, only in trivial ways. This is the misperception which the present project set out to correct. To make possible systematic empirical documentation of contemporary usage it was decided to compile a digitised corpus of spoken and written texts. In order to facilitate comparison of Jamaican English with other "Old" and New Englishes, such as British English, Irish English or Singapore English, we sampled the data as part of the International Corpus of English (ICE), which prescribes a total corpus size of one million words for each variety documented, to be composed of 600,000 words of spoken and 400,000 words of written English covering a broad range of formal and informal genres. The collection of spoken texts was undertaken jointly with colleagues at the University of the West Indies (Mona, Jamaica), who also helped with difficulties of transcription in recordings of spontaneous speech. A beta-version of ICE-Jamaica was completed in October 2006 and used immediately in ongoing Freiburg-based research. A proofed version prepared for public distribution was presented to the international academic community at the 14th annual conference of lAWE, the International Association of World Englishes in Hong Kong in December 2008. The major research findings of the group so far are contained in the three project-related PhDs: a socio-phonetic/ instrumental-phonetic analysis of the major segmental features of Jamaican English (Rosenfelder), a study of concord and agreement in this variety (Jantos) and a quantitative and qualitative study of discourse-markers, quotation strategies and code-switching (Höhn). Numerous additional lexico-grammatical variables have been investigated as part of an ongoing post-doctoral/ "Habilitation" thesis on "Style and standards in the Anglophone Caribbean" (Deuber). Mair's research and publications in the funding period have focussed on comparisons between lexico-grammatical trends in Jamaican English and other varieties and on assessing degrees of standardisation and codification in this emerging standard. Outside academia, the project team's findings are certain to meet with considerable interest in Jamaica and the Caribbean, a region in which issues such as use of English and Creole in the educational system, the use of Creole in written texts or in the formal public media, and the relative attraction of local or international (British/American) models of usage are the subject of occasionally heated public controversy. In this connection, probably the most surprising over-all finding of our work has been to show how far removed contemporary educated practice in Jamaica has become from the inherited colonial British norm, which a fair number of Jamaicans still profess allegiance to in theory.
Publications
- 2007. "English in North America and the Caribbean." In Christopher F. Laferl & Bernhard Poll (eds), Amerika und die Norm. Literatursprache zwischen Tradition und Innovation. Tübingen: Niemeyer. 3-23
Mair, Christian
- 2007. "Getting at the standards behind the standard ideology: what corpora can tell us about linguistic norms." In Sabine Volk-Birke und Julia Lippert (eds), Anglistentag 2006 Halle: Proceedings. Trier: Wissenschaftlicher Verlag. 2007. 341-353
Mair, Christian, und Sandra Mollin
- 2008. "Discourse styles in spoken British English: a corpus-based study." Recherches Anglaises et Nord Américaines (RANAM) 41: Variability and Change in Language and Discourse. Strasbourg: Universités des Sciences Humaines. 161-186
Höhn, Nicole
- (2009). The English we speaking": morphological and syntactic variation in educated Jamaican speech. Journal of Pidgin and Creole Languages 24: 1-52
Deuber, Dagmar
