Words_about_words_An_introduction_to_Eng

Lexical Strata in English

return to the initial North – South separation, though with a “Lower North” and “Upper South” subdivision.

A number of pronunciation, grammar and vocabulary characteristics of regional dialects, as compared to General American English, are highlighted by Davies (2005).

In terms of pronunciation, for example, in the Eastern dialects, rhotic /r/ is lost after vowels, while it is maintained in all positions in General American, a rounded vowel has been preserved in these varieties in words such as top and dot, while the standard language uses an unrounded vowel. The “Southern droll” is specific of Southern dialects. It is “produced largely through a combination of slower enunciation and diphthongization of stressed vowels, so that a word like class is pronounced like [klӕis] or [klӕjəs]. Final consonant clusters may also be weakened in words like kind, fast and slept. No distinction occurs in much of the South between words like pen and pin, the mid vowel /e/ being raised to a high front vowel before nasals” (Davies 2005: 49).

Of the grammatical peculiarities of Southern dialects, Davies (2005) mentions the use of the special pronoun you-all, [jal], for the second person plural, the use of a-prefixing, as in She’s a-working, “the use of done with an adverbial function meaning ‘already’, as in He done got fired (restricted to working class speech), and the combination of two modal verbs, as in He might could bring the truck. One rather unusual non-standard feature found in informal usage in a number of American regional dialects is the use of anymore in positive sentences to mean ‘nowadays’, as in this example from Encarta World English Dictionary: We always use a taxi anymore” (Davies 2005: 49).

American dialects differ in terms of vocabulary, too. They have distinctive regional words, many of which are connected to food specific to the areas where they are used: as quoted by Davies (2005), corn chowder (a soup) and cruller (doughnut) for the North-Eastern parts of the USA, grits (boiled cornmeal) and gumbo (a soup or stew) for the South.

“Much of the lexicon of American English reflects a non-rooted spirit and the mobility associated with both the American past and the contemporary way of life. The arrival of train travel in the 19th century brought a large number of new words and expressions into the language, as can be seen in this second extract from the novel On the Road” (Davies 2005: 50):

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The words written in italics are now recognized as belonging to the American geographical variety of English. Some are creations on the territory of this variety, others are loan words. To hop freights means “to jump on a train without a paid ticket”, a flatcar is “a railway carriage with no roof or walls, used for carrying large or heavy goods”, a boxer is a “railway carriage for carrying goods, with high sides and a roof”, bum (from the German Bummler) refers to “a lazy person”, while brakemen are “people operating the brakes of a train”.

The outer circle groups together “territories in Asia and Africa to which English was first transported in colonial contexts and where it has since existed alongside very different local languages. Many people use English as a second language within these multilingual contexts and the language also has an institutional and administrative importance” (Davies 2005: 47).

The Indian subcontinent follows the US and UK closely, in terms of the number of speakers of English. The varieties of English in this area, including India, Bangladesh, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Nepal and Bhutan, are known collectively as “South Asian English”, with Indian English as its most representative exponent, due to the privileged relationships the British Crown held with India and the mass of users of English in this country.

After India became independent, in 1947, despite its then prime minister’s predictions that English would no longer be used in a generation’s time, it was eventually considered the best unifying element in a region where linguistic complexity has always been obvious. “In the 1960s, the ‘three-language-formula’ was agreed, stipulating that all citizens should learn a national, a regional and a local language. Since then, English has had several legislated roles in India: as an associated official language alongside Hindi as the official one, as a national language alongside Hindi, Bengali and Tamil, as the state language of Manipur, Meghalaya, Nagaland and Tripura, and as the official language of eight Union territories” (Davies 2005: 52).

Standard, educated Indian or South Asian English is a pretty uniform variety that has become as internationally acceptable as British and American English, though occasional differences in grammar and style between them are sometimes present. However, the educated variety is not employed unanimously. The English actually used ranges, according to the educational, economic and social background of its speakers, from “stigmatized pidgin varieties” (Davies 2005: 54), spoken by those with a lower status, to the standard South Asian English, spoken by the well educated and more privileged classes of the Indian society.

As Davies (2005) explains, at the phonetic level, Indian English is characterized by the presence of rhoticity (/r/ is pronounced in words like port, floor and worker), by the tendency to use fairly evenly stressed vowels in words like open, and the ‘singsong’ quality of its intonation” (Davies 2005: 54). In terms of grammar, the use of uninverted word order in wh-

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questions is immediately noticeable (Why she is talking like that?) and so is the use of the adverb only in sentence final position, for emphatic purposes (We are going there three times a year only instead of We are going there only three times a year). Other peculiarities are the employment of the progressive aspect to refer to habitual actions (when the simple aspect should have been used), “the undifferentiated use of the tag isn’t it, as in She is with them now, isn’t it? and the adverbial use of there instead of the introductory or ‘dummy’ There is / are, for example, Fruit is there, plates are there” (Davies 2005: 54).

From a lexical perspective, a number of words and phrases may be said to be peculiar of Indian English. Among these, there are, according to Wikipedia: shift (“move from one apartment to another”), weatish complexion (“light, creamy brown complexion”), expire (“to die”, especially in reference to one’s family member), acting pricey (“playing ‘hard to get’”), dearness allowance (“payment given to employees to compensate for the effects of inflation”), chargesheet (“to file charges against someone in court”), on the anvil (used frequently in the Indian press to mean “about to happen, to take place”), out of station (“out of town”), etc. Local words and expressions often intersperse with English ones. Dhobi-wallah (“laundryman”), bandh (“local strike”), lathi (“police truncheon”), lakh (“one hundred thousand”), crore (“ten million”), bheris (“fish farms”), dacoities (“attacks”), quoted by Davies (2005), are only some of these. The penetration of indigenous lexical items in South Asian English is not a novel process. It actually began in the colonial period, “as British administrators adopted an ever-increasing number of local words and phrases, many of which, like brahmin, bungalow, jute, purdah and chutney, are still wellknown as borrowings into English today” (Davies 2005: 54).

The expanding circle includes “territories in which English has become or is becoming the most important foreign language” (Davies 2005: 46).

Romania is, undoubtedly, one such territory. During the past twenty years, English has evidently become the most prestigious foreign language in our country, especially among the younger generations. Pârlog (2004) explains that this is partly the consequence of the temptation of the youngsters to sprinkle their vocabulary with words belonging to the BritishAmerican super-civilization to which their parents had been denied access. By doing this, “they feel closer to the Western man (usually American), perceived as a competent, enterprising, prosperous and reliable person” (Pârlog 2004: 94). On the other hand, Romanians nowadays are more frequently exposed to the English language - they can read a large number of newspapers, magazines and books in English; throughout the country, they can watch TV channels that broadcast in this language; and they have numerous occasions of hearing and using English during their travels abroad or as the language of communication in business settings. Journalists and public people also contribute to English having a high

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status in Romania, by using Anglicisms quite often, both in their spoken and in their written materials. To these possible reasons why English ranks the first among the foreign languages circulating in Romania, I may add its increasing importance in the official school curricula, starting in kindergarten and ending at university level. Not to mention the fact that even subjects such as mathematics, physics or chemistry are taught in English in more and more bilingual schools. Higher education has its share of programs offered in English, too.

The importance that English has gained in Romania resulted in our language being a good host for Anglicisms, which have become frequent in the language of domains such as IT, business, the entertainment industry, sports, etc.

The words and phrases that Romanian has borrowed from English fall within two categories, in terms of their behaviour relative to the host language. Some have remained non-assimilated, others have adapted to Romanian in various ways, as I have recently demonstrated in an article on the language of youth entertainment magazines published in our country (Frăţilă 2010).

Examples of Anglicisms selected from the corpus analyzed that have been imported and have not undergone any changes include: nouns without inflections, determiners or modifiers or used as parts of verb collocations (software pentru gestionarea muzicii – “software for managing music”; te duci cu gândul la shopping – “you think of shopping”; s-a dat click de peste nouă milioane de ori – “they gave a click over nine million times”), adjectives used as attributes or as predicatives, in the postive degree (tot felul de pedepse funny – “all sorts of funny punishments”; am rămas addicted – “I remained addicted”; trebuie să rămâi fair – “you have to remain fair”) and adverbs used as attributes or as adverbials (caracteristici de navigare outdoor – “characteristics of outdoor navigation”; comunitate online – “online community”; backstage se află cel mai mare fan – “his greatest fan is backstage”), etc.

In the same corpus, examples of borrowed words assimilated directly or indirectly are:

•nouns that have been assigned Romanian gender by various means, such as the presence of a Romanian indefinite or definite article or Romanian inflections for number, case, gender (masculine: am fost însoţiţi de un bodyguard – “we were

accompanied by a bodyguard”; designerii ne surpind constant – “designers constantly surprise us”; feminine: sunt o fană Liza Minelli – “I am a Lisa Minelli fan”; fanele mai pot spera – “the fans can still hope”; neuter: completează cu un blush roz – “add a pink blush”; target-ul îl reprezintă copiii – “the target is represented by children”);

•nouns whose gender is assigned by the presence of a pronominal adjective or modifier marked for gender (neuter: cum poţi păstra

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acest look – “how you can preserve this look”; masculine: este noul superstar al rockului – “he is the new superstar of rock”);

•nouns obtained by derivation with Romanian suffixes, from English roots (diploma de cea mai bine îmbrăcată coolgirliţă –

“diploma for the best-dressed ‘coolgirliţă’”; o fashionistă precum actriţa K.B. – “a ‘fashionistă’” like the actress K.B.”; Eşti cea mai dulce maroonică – “You are the sweetest ‘maroonică’”);

•adjectives used in the Romanian comparative and superlative degrees (cea mai cool pereche de balerini – “the coolest pair of shoes”; foarte simplu şi foarte cool – „very simple and very cool”);

•verbs conjugated according to the Romanian pattern (poţi uploada fotografii – „you can upload photographs”; nu ştiu să managerieze problemele sufleteşti – “they cannot manage soul problems”; pe unde am mixat, lumea s-a distrat – “people had fun wherever I mixed music”).

The stable status that some English words already have in Romanian may be proven by the fact that they are used in the host language with more than one of their meanings. This is the case of the word net, for example, which circulates in Romanian both with its “the thing that tennis players hit the ball over” meaning and with the “online network” meaning. Similarly, modeling occurs both as “the activity of making models of objects” and as “the job of working as a model”.

Besides borrowings proper, at least two other aspects that my research on Anglicisms in Romanian youth magazines uncovered may be considered illustrative of the influence English, as the major foreign language in Romania, has exerted on our language. On the one hand, phrases that adopt both the meaning and the structure of corresponding English phrases have occurred in Romanian. Some such phraseological calques are cod de bare (“bar code”), a avea fluturaşi în stomac (“to have butterflies in one’s stomach”) and a ţine prima pagină (“to keep the front page”). On the other, a number of Romanian words have been identified whose meanings seem to have enlarged under the influence of English words they share at least one sense with. For example, chimie - “the scientific study of substances and of the way they react with other substances”, got the extra meaning “affective relationship between people”, under the influence of the English chemistry, while scândură – “flat piece of wood”, has come to also mean “board with four wheels that one stands on and rides”, influenced by its English partial synonym skateboard.

6.2.2. Ethnic varieties of English

Ethnicity, understood as the common ancestry, race and distinctive culture of a group of people (whose representatives live in smaller or larger communities in a certain country), is reflected in the language these people

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use. In the case of English, at least two ethnic varieties are very wellestablished: the African American Vernacular English (AAVE) and Chicano English.

The former is spoken by about 90 percent of the black population of African origin in the United States, the majority of which comes from innercity and working class backgrounds.

AAVE exhibits a number of peculiar linguistic features.

As Davies (2005) indicates, in its phonology, there are certain characteristics that are shared with Southern US English - the use of the monophthong /a/ rather than the diphthong /ai/ in words like hide, I and time, particularly before voiced consonants, and the merging of the short vowels /e/ and /i/ before nasals, the phonemic distinction between words such as ten and tin being thus lost. As far as its consonantal system is concerned, for example, post-vocalic /r/ is not pronounced in word-final position, before a consonant or in between vowels (in words such as door, short or Carol). “Another distinctive feature is the reduction of word-final clusters (through the loss of the final consonant) in words like rest, child, cold (pronounced as if spelled res’, chil’, and col’), although this does not apply where there is a cluster of voiced followed by voiceless consonants, as in felt or pump… Aspects of the rhythm and intonation of AAVE are also distinctive. One rhythmical feature that is often reflected in written representations of the variety is the deletion of the first syllable in words like about or remember, shown as ‘bout and ‘member” (Davies 2005: 67).

From a grammatical perspective, the use of the verb in AAVE seems to be the most interesting, in terms of its divergence from Standard English or other US dialects. The verb, to be, for example, is often deleted, both as a copula (except for cases when it agrees with subjects of the first person) and as an auxiliary verb, so that sentences like She a doctor, instead of She is a doctor and He gonna leave instead of He is going to leave are common in AAVE. When referring to habitual, recurrent actions or lasting characteristics of things, an invariant form of be is used, so that a statement like This room is often warm becomes This room be warm. “In AAVE, there is a contrast in aspect between the forms subject+be+verb-ing and subject+verb-ing without be: for example, she be singin’ means ‘she often sings’, whereas she singin’ means “she’s singing now’” (Davies 2005: 68).

In addition, as Davies (2005) points out, non-standard subjectpredicate agreement is also peculiar of AAVE (They is there, She don’t like it), alongside the use of ain’t in negative clauses, together with other negative words sometimes (She ain’t got a car, He ain’t got no money) and the inversion of the subject and the auxiliary in declarative sentences with a negative word as subject (Didn’t nobody hear her – Nobody heard her;

Wasn’t nobody there – Nobody was there).

Unsurprisingly, the vocabulary of AAVE contains words of African origin (juke, okra, tote, banjo) and words from English to which AfroAmerican speakers have attached meanings that differ from those of these

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words in the mainstream language. Examples of lexical items in the latter category, as offered by Davies (2005) are: bad for “good”, uptight for “anxious” and jive for “insincere talk”. To these, Wikipedia adds grey, used as an adjective for whites (probably from the colour of Confederate uniforms) and kitchen for the particularly curly or kinky hair at the nape of one’s neck.

Last, but not least, AAVE is also characterized by certain “identifiable discourse strategies and speaking styles” (Davies 2005: 69), called by Smitherman (1995) the “African American Verbal Tradition” (AVT). These strategies are visible, for example, in the speech of public figures who are bidialectal, due to their having been brought up in AAVEspeaking communities and include specific “intonation, address systems, the use of tag questions and so on,…closely associated with the signaling of solidarity within the African American community” (Davies 2005: 69). As Lippi-Green (1997:177), quoted by Davies (2005) has shown:

… even when no grammatical, phonological or lexical features of AAVE are used, a person can, in effect, still be speaking AAVE by means of AVT rhetorical devices. Thus, while the core grammatical features of AAVE may be heard most consistently in poorer black communities where there are strong social and communication networks, AAVE phonology (particularly intonation) and black rhetorical style are heard, on occasion, from prominent and successful African Americans in public forums.

A considerably big ethnic group in the United States is that of the Hispanics – people of Mexican, Puerto Rican, Cuban and other Spanishspeaking backgrounds. According to Baugh and Cable (2002), in the 1990 US census, 60 percent of the Hispanics reported their national origin to be Mexican and it has been estimated that Mexican-American English, or Chicano English is now spoken by around 30 million people in the US.

Like AAVE, Chicano English is characterized by a number of distinctive features. The main differences from Standard English lie, in its case, in pronunciation. A selection of phonological characteristics of Chicano English has been made by Davies (2005), following Tottie (2002). It includes, among other features: the devoicing of /z/ to /s/, so that spies sounds like spice, and of /v/ to /f/, in word-final position, so that live come to be uttered like life; the reduction of consonant clusters, so it’s is pronounced /iz/; the lengthening of /e/ in words like intention, send; the shortening of /i/ in words like feel and week, etc. The tendency to place the stress on the final element of compounds (police de’partment rather than po’lice department) and to utter statements with a rising rather than falling intonation also characterize Chicano English from a phonological point of view.

In terms of grammar, as Williams (2005) and Fought (2003) pointed out, divergence of Chicano English from the Standard variety, occurring mainly under the influence of the speakers’ mother tongue,

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Spanish, may be illustrated by: the use of double negation (I didn’t do nothing, She didn’t want no advice); the expression of possession for the third person through prepositional phrases rather than nouns (The car of my brother is red, I live in the house of my mother) and non-standard form in the pronoun system in general (They have to start supporting theirselves at early ages, He’s a guy, he could take care of hisself); the regularisation of the past tense and other uses of non-standard verb-forms (I ain’t ok, I

haven’t wrote in a long time, It spinned, Those were the people that I

hanged around with, I had like three weeks that I had came out the hospital before I got shot); the use of the auxiliary would in conditional clauses (If I woulda been a gangster, I woulda been throwing signs up; If

TT wouldn’t’ve dropped those fumbles, then the Bills would’ve won); the use of the preposition in instead of on (Macarena got in the bus, We got in our bikes and rode down the hill), of for instead of the adverbial phrase so

that (For my mum can understand, For she won’t feel guilty), etc.

Just like users of AAVE, speakers of Chicano English employ a number of words present in mainstream English, with a peculiar meaning. What Fought (2003) finds interesting about these lexical items is the fact that, contrary to general expectations, the meanings they are used with seem to be influenced by the semantics of Spanish only in few cases. For illustrative purposes, she quotes from the interviews she took to speakers of Chicano English: fool, for “guy”, not necessarily pejoratively used (Man, fool, you can take the bread out the oven); kick it, to mean “to hang around”, but also, more generally, “to wait for a while” (Just kick it, do it tonight); talk to, meaning “to date” (We started talking and then I didn’t talk to him no more; I talk to his sister); tell for “ask” (If I tell her to jump

up, she’ll tell me how high; Can you answer questions in Spanish?/It depends on what you tell me); barely, meaning “recently” (I just barely checked in); American for “European-American” or “white” (It wasn’t the American lady, it was the other one), etc.

Ethnic varieties of English (and of any other language, for that matter) play an important role in preserving the shared identity of a particular minority group within a majority mass. It is because of this that members of an ethnic minority will not give up using its characteristic vernacular (although, on occasions, the standard language is used, especially by the upper educated classes) and will fight, by cultural and political means, to ensure its survival.

6.2.3. Social varieties of English

6.2.3.1. Standard English

Standard English (SE) is the variety of English considered the norm in an English-speaking country, usually associated with users belonging to the upper well-educated social classes on the one hand, and to

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the media and the official social, scientific, political, cultural, etc. settings, on the other. SE is also the variety taught to learners of English as a foreign language. However, it should not be understood that it is spoken by members of the upper social classes and in the previously mentioned contexts only – it is spread, admittedly, in a non-uniform way, across the whole social spectrum and it is encountered in less formal environments as well.

Trudgill’s (1999) attempt at describing SE, in terms of both what it is and what it is not, resulted in highlighting the fact that, on the one hand, SE is not an accent. It can be identified mainly by its vocabulary, grammar and orthography, but not by its pronunciation. In Britain, there is “a high status and widely described accent known as ‘Received Pronunciation’ (RP)”, referred to during the former half of the 20th century as “King’s English”, “Queen’s English” and “BBC English” also, “which is sociolinguistically unusual when seen from a global perspective in that it is not associated with any geographical area, being instead a purely social accent associated with speakers in all parts of the country, or at least in England, from upper-class and upper-middle-class backgrounds” (Trudgill 1999: 118). There seems to be wide agreement, though, on the fact that, while users of RP also speak SE, not all speakers of SE speak it with an RP. According to Trudgill and Chesire (1998), about 10% of the population in Britain speak SE with some form of regional accent, even if this is not very distant from RP. Therefore, it is justified to say that “while RP is, in a sense, standardized, it is a standardized accent of English and not Standard English itself. This point becomes even clearer from an international perspective. Standard English speakers can be found in all Englishspeaking countries, and it goes without saying that they speak this variety with different non-RP accents, depending on whether they came from Scotland or the USA or New Zealand or wherever” (Trudgill 1999: 118).

SE is not a style either (style being regarded as a language variety that can be placed on a continuum, ranging from very formal to very informal). Trudgill (1999) considers it appropriate to assert the independence (at least theoretical, if not always practical) of the parameter standard – non-standard from the parameter formal – informal. According to him, a sentence like The old man was bloody knackered after his long trip may be considered a clear instance of SE, though “couched in a very informal style” (Trudgill 1999: 120), while a sentence like Father were very tired after his lengthy journey would be, for most, an example of nonstandard English (due to the grammatically incorrect agreement between the subject and the verb), “couched in a rather formal style” (Trudgill 1999: 120). What follows from here is that, even if SE tends to be used at the formal end of the continuum mentioned (a fact imposed by context), it is not impossible for it to be employed in an informal way, too. Stylistic switching occurs within the variety in question and not between it and another one.

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Following the same line of thinking, Trudgill (1999) argues that equating SE to register (seen as a variety of language connected to a particular topic, subject matter or activity, such as mathematics, medicine, physics, law, etc.) would be as inappropriate as equating it to style or accent. “It is of course true that it is most usual in English-speaking societies to employ Standard English when one is using scientific registers - this is the social convention, we might say. But one can certainly acquire and use technical registers without using Standard English, just as one can employ non-technical registers while speaking or writing Standard English. There is, once again, no necessary connection between the two. Thus,

“There was two eskers what we saw in them U-shaped valleys is a nonstandard English sentence, couched in the technical register of physical geography” (Trudgill 1999: 121). As the author suggests, the way of mingling non-standard grammar with standardized vocabulary illustrated by the sentence just quoted is not uncommon in certain linguistic communities, such as, he says, the German-speaking Switzerland, where the local non-standard dialect is used in almost all contexts of communication, for nearly all purposes. Here, a discussion between two philosophy professors on Kant’s ideas, carried on employing the terminology specific to their area of expertise and, at the same time, the phonology and grammar of the local dialect, would not come as a surprise at all. Thus, what is emphasized is the fact that there seems to be no sound reasons why technical vocabulary should be considered the prerogative of standard varieties only and that “if you are a nonstandard dialect speaker and it is possible to acquire new non-technical words within your own nonstandard dialect, it is sadly by definition impossible to acquire technical words without switching to the standard variety” (Trudgill 1999: 121). In other words, “there is no necessary connection between Standard English and technical registers” (Trudgill 1999: 121).

Once what SE is not has been made clear, the question of what it actually is arises naturally. As already stated at the beginning of this section, SE is a language variety, a dialect which displays characteristics that individualize it as pretty unusual among the other dialects of English.

In general, as Trudgill (1999) points out, dialects are geographical and social varieties at the same time, situated along a continuum. Unlike them, SE cannot be considered part of such a continuum, due to the nature of standardization itself. “There is really no continuum linking Standard English to other dialects because the codification that forms a crucial part of the standardization process results in a situation where, in most cases, a feature is either standard or it is not” (Trudgill 1999: 122). As such, SE is considered by the author a purely social dialect and, due to its great sociological importance, no longer a geographical one, though, for some particular purpose, one may speak about Scottish Standard English, or American Standard English, or British Standard English. However, the differences between these are actually almost imperceptible and even in

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