Determinants of sociolinguistic variation in the ESL/EFL English: Evidence from two academic communities
Final Report Abstract
This project explores the patterns and determinants of language variation in two variatal types of English, Indian English and English spoken in Germany, and contrasts those with native speaker English, thereby revising the traditional ESL/EFL (English as a Second Language/English as a Foreign Language) distinction and its contribution to our understanding of the processes underlying the formation of the global forms of English. In so doing, it addresses the following research questions: (1) How do non-native speakers appropriate the patterns of sociolinguistic variation attested in native-speaker English? (2) And what language-internal mechanisms and sociolinguistic processes shape the resulting non-native speaker grammars? The project has also been trying to ascertain the role played by language ideologies and, as a result, language attitudes in the process of adaptation of variable linguistic features by language learners. Indeed, it is impossible to understand how a given linguistic feature is appropriated by a given group of speakers unless we gain a better understanding of the kinds of social meanings that learners attach to the variant. Methodologically, the study contributes to the investigation of World Englishes by creating two directly comparable databases on non-native English.
Publications
- 2015. “A study in the perception of native and non-native Englishes by German learners”. Journal of Linguistics and Language Teaching. JLLT Volume 6 (2015) Issue 1, S. 89-118
Davydova, Julia
- 2015. “Expanding the circle to Learner English: Investigating quotative marking in a German student community” American Speech 90(4): 441–478
Davydova, Julia & Isabelle Buchstaller
(See online at https://doi.org/10.1215/00031283-3442128) - 2015. “Linguistic change in a multilingual setting: A case study of quotatives in Indian English”. In: Peter Collins (ed.) Grammatical Change in English World-Wide. (The Studies in Corpus Linguistics Series, series editor: Elena Tognini-Bonelli.) Amsterdam & Philadelphia: John Benjamins, pp. 297–334
Davydova, Julia
- "Indian English quotatives in a realtime perspective”. In: Elena Seoane & Cristina Suárez-Gómez (eds.) World Englishes: New Theoretical and Methodoligical Considerations. [Varieties of English around the World, series editor: Stephanie Hackert]. Amsterdam & Philadelphia: Benjamins, 2016. S. 173-204
Davydova, Julia
