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Article published In:
English World-Wide
Vol. 43:2 (2022) ► pp.192–219

How real has the long-anticipated fast-growing influence of American English on Kenyan English been?

A corpus-backed focus on vocabulary

| University of Nairobi

In the 1990s, the existing literature anticipated a fast-growing influence of American English on Kenyan English in the following years. Mazrui and Mazrui (1996) even predicted a “coca-colanization” of Kenyan English. Focusing on vocabulary, the present study investigated whether the anticipated influence has occurred or not. From a sample of 75 fourth-year university students it collected self-reports of which words they used from 93 pairs of American-vs-British English counterparts. These self-reports were then compared with, among others, the frequencies of the same words in two corpora of Kenyan English which were compiled two decades apart. The study found that the respondents’ self-reports indicated a 59 percent use of British English vocabulary, against only a 28 percent use of American English vocabulary. This finding was by and large corroborated by the frequencies of the words concerned in the two corpora. Thus, the anticipated American English influence has not materialized.

Keywords: American English, British English, Global Web-Based English Corpus, Kenyan English, Kenyan sub-corpus of the International Corpus of English, vocabulary
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Methodology
  • 3.Results and discussion
    • 3.1Respondents’ self-reports of their use of AmE or BrE vocabulary
    • 3.2Respondents’ self-report percentages vis-à-vis corpus-data frequencies
    • 3.3The overall picture: Evidence of greater BrE than AmE influence on KenE vocabulary
    • 3.4Key determinants of the respondents’ self-report choices
      • 3.4.1Semantic field
      • 3.4.2Unfamiliarity of some lexical items to the respondents
      • 3.4.3Variability in the use of some lexical items
  • 4.Conclusion
  • Notes
  • Sources
  • References
Published online: 2 March 2022
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/eww.21049.bur
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