This book encourages further conversation on the expanding circle in World Englishes, offering a detailed look at ‘China English’ through the academic writing of Chinese students at a British university. The volume seeks to blur the simplistic binary of ‘Chinglish’, a broad term often understood to encompass grammatical or lexical errors or seemingly ‘unnatural’ expressions, and ‘China English’, which the authors articulate here as its own variety, as evidenced in language use marked by predictability. The research framework begins with analysing student essays in one programme at the University of Manchester, predominantly made up of Chinese students. In highlighting recurring features and supported by online surveys of the students, the authors demonstrate how ‘China English’ displays the systematicity in grammar and lexis observed in varieties of English. In focusing on academic writing, a genre which bears prominence in assessment, the book raises key questions about implications for teaching, what is considered appropriate language, and whether, rather than seeking to replace ‘Standard English’, the notion of what is ‘standard’ might be broadened to encompass other varieties. The book further promotes implications beyond pedagogies, to include learning more broadly, marking, curriculum/policy, training, and identity negotiation. This book will be of interest to students and scholars in language and education, World Englishes, sociolinguistics, and applied linguistics.

Recent developments in contact linguistics suggest considerable overlap of branches such as historical linguistics, variationist sociolinguistics, pidgin/creole linguistics, language acquisition, etc. This book highlights the complexity of contact-induced language change throughout the history of English by bringing together cutting-edge research from these fields. Special focus is on recent debates surrounding substratal influence in earlier forms of English (particularly Celtic influence in Old English), on language shift processes (the formation of Irish and overseas varieties) but also on dialects in contact, the contact origins of Standard English, the notion of new epicentres in World English, the role of children and adults in language change as well as transfer and language learning. With contributions from leading experts, the book offers fresh and exciting perspectives for research and is at the same time an up-to-date overview of the state of the art in the respective fields.

There is an ever-growing body of work on New Englishes, and the time has come to take stock of how research on varieties of English is carried out. The contributions in this volume critically explore the gamut of familiar and unfamiliar methods applied in data collection and analysis in order to improve upon old methods and develop new methods for the study of English around the world. The authors present novel approaches to the use of the International Corpus of English, critical insights into phonological analyses of New Englishes, applications of linguistic dialectology in territories in which New Englishes are used, improvements on attitudinal research, and an array of mixed-methods approaches. The contributions in this volume also include a range of Englishes, considered not only in situ but also in online and diaspora settings, and thus question received understandings of what counts as New Englishes.

Discusses the spread of English around the world from a social and linguistic perspective.

Written in a detailed and fascinating manner, this book is ideal for general readers interested in the English language.

The spread, functions and models of the New Englishes have become a dominant theme of the eighties. This volume addresses, specifically, the English used in Singapore in the private and public domains, particularly the school system. The topics covered include: an overview of earlier studies and attempts at codification; a consideration of whether the formal mode of written Singapore English should be standardised; the problems of pronounciation; etc. and specific lexico-grammatical problems which have proved to be ambiguous for those not familiar with Singapore English. Also included in this volume is the largest bibliography so far published on Singapore English with over 700 titles listed, thus providing an essential tool for any future research.

The English language as spoken in Namibia has virtually been overlooked in most textbooks, handbooks, and surveys of varieties of English around the world, or else has only been mentioned in passing. However, this variety of English has recently attracted the attention of several researchers and the present volume brings together most scholars actively involved in the research on English in Namibia from various linguistic fields to present their current research. It covers a wide range of linguistic issues, such as empirical analyses on various levels of linguistic description and use, as well as the application of diverse methodologies, from questionnaire surveys, sociolinguistic interviews and focus group discussions, to corpus linguistics, linguistic landscaping, and digital ethnography. This book represents the first comprehensive collection of articles and in-depth discussions of this emerging variety of World Englishes.

This book takes an integrated approach to the fields of Corpus Linguistics, Construction Grammar, and World Englishes through a thorough constructional and corpus-based examination of the patterning of the versatile high-frequency verb make in British English and New Englishes. It contributes to Construction Grammar theory by adopting a verb-based, rather than construction-based, perspective on argument structure. This allows the probing of the interface between verb-independent generalizations and item-specificity from an underexplored angle that offers new insights into the shape of the constructicon. From a variationist perspective, it seeks to (i) identify features of New Englishes and gauge whether these features exhibit traces of conventionalization, and (ii) assess whether the degree of institutionalization of the New Englishes correlates with linguistic behavior, both from a social and cognitive perspective, thereby contributing to the budding effort to integrate the cognitive and social dimensions into the modeling of linguistic variation in World Englishes.