Epicentres in World Englishes: empirical diachronic studies of present-day South Asian Englishes

• Applicants: Dr. Tobias Bernaisch; Professor Stefan Th. Gries, Ph.D.
• Subject Area: Individual Linguistics, Historical Linguistics
• Term: since 2021
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 456646144

This project dedicates itself to determining the extent to which short-term diachronic linguistic change in Anglophone South Asia comprising Bangladeshi, Indian, Maldivian, Nepali, Pakistani and Sri Lankan English is empirically and sociolinguistically reconcilable with a linguistic epicentre of the region. The concept of a linguistic epicentre accounts for linguistic commonalities of several varieties in a given region by suggesting that these shared linguistic structures originate in a model variety of the region – its linguistic epicentre – and subsequently permeate to neighbour varieties of the epicentre, which integrate and establish them. With a focus on South Asian Englishes, three research gaps motivate this project: a) the lack of multifactorial empirical research into South Asian Englishes, b) the lack of diachronic studies in World Englishes in general and South Asian Englishes in particular and c) the insufficient empirical research into linguistic epicentres. Relevant contributions to the closing of these research gaps will be devised with the help of a corpus environment consisting of short-term diachronic newspaper texts representing the six South Asian Englishes – as well as American and British English for control purposes. Short-term diachronic linguistic change will be studied at the structural interface between lexis and grammar, which is a central indicator for the development of postcolonial Englishes, by conducting multifactorial analyses of and devising statistical models for the alternations covering a) analytic vs. synthetic adjective comparison, b) mandative subjunctive vs. should construction, c) particle placement and d) genitives. These short-term diachronic structural observations will be complemented with sociolinguistic profiles of the individual South Asian Englishes – with a particular focus on determining their evolutionary status – and their connections with one another to ultimately offer an empirically and sociolinguistically reliable evaluation of the extent to which the notion of a linguistic epicentre explains short-term diachronic linguistic developments in South Asian Englishes.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants