Corpus Linguistics and World Englishes: An Analysis of Xhosa English

Description

English is a global language which has spread historically through imperialism and more recently through communication networks throughout the world. In each location in which English is spoken it absorbs some of the idiosyncracies of the language native to that region, and one of the most fascinating areas of research for World Englishes is the African context. This research monograph examines English as it is spoken in South Africa, and is based primarily on an extensive spoken corpus of Xhosa English. Vivian de Klerk presents a detailed and comprehensive analysis of the historical development of this language, and of English in South Africa more generally. The book outlines how the corpus of spoken language was designed and built, and discusses the criteria relating to informants, spoken categories, codes and transcription conventions. The syntactic, phonological and pragmatic features of Xhosa English as demonstrated by the corpus are described in detail, and two chapters focus on discourse markers such as 'actually' and 'well'. The second section of this book examines the sociolinguistic implications of the corpus findings. Vivian de Klerk looks at language in educational, legal, social, cultural and everyday contexts. The final chapter of the book speculates as to the future of this fascinating variety of English in a globalised world. This cutting-edge study will be of interest to researchers in world Englishes, language variation and corpus linguistics.

Professor Vivian de Klerk is the Head of the Department of English Language and Linguistics at Rhodes University, South Africa. She is the editor of Focus on English in Southern Africa, John Benjamins: 1996.

mention- Book News Inc./ August 2007 "Here DeKlerk confronts us with an issue that goes beyond the concerns of corpus linguistics and the description of World Englishes as such...Corpus Linguistics is an intriguing and challenging book in many ways." -International Journal of Corpus Linguistics -- Angelika Breiteneder "In sum, de Klerk documents two important steps towards proving that Xhosa English is one of the world Englishes: the creation of a corpus, and the proof that it differs from other varieties of English, based on an analysis of this corpus" -Anthropological Linguistics "This book should be of great interest to students and researchers... [it] offers inspiring discussions on issues of linguistic identity and language attitude in the speech community...this book is beautifully written, well-structured, and extremely accessible. It is an exemplary work for students interested in pursuing corpus-based language studies and a valuable resource for researchers interested in studying BSAE and XE as world Englishes." Xiaofei Lu, The Linguist List, 2007 -- Xiaofei Lu * Linguist List, The *