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Article published In:
English World-Wide
Vol. 45:1 (2024) ► pp.61–93

Editors and world Englishes

Exploring (the interaction between) editors’ sociolinguistic profiles and the norm-providing sources they use for editing work

ORCID logo | North-West University

The impact of editorial intervention on the language of published written texts has been the topic of a handful of recent empirical investigations within the world Englishes paradigm. These studies have demonstrated that the linguistic changes that editors make to texts written in world Englishes contexts are not as conservative or consistent as previously assumed, with some scholars suggesting that the sociolinguistic profiles of such editors might account for the varying behaviours noted in the corpus-based investigations. In this article, I build on recent arguments for a more considered view of the impact of editorial intervention on the language of published written texts in world Englishes contexts by examining editors’ sociolinguistic profiles and the overt norms they draw on in the course of their work to explore how they orient their normative behaviour and how this may be related to the evolutionary development of their respective varieties.

Keywords: world Englishes, editors, norms, codification, endonormativity, Australia, South Africa
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Background
    • 2.1World Englishes and linguistic norms
    • 2.2Editing and norms
    • 2.3English and normativity in South Africa and Australia
  • 3.Method
    • 3.1Questionnaire design and distribution
    • 3.2Processing and analysis of data
  • 4.Analysis and discussion
    • 4.1Sociodemographic profiles of editors
    • 4.2Linguistic profiles of editors
    • 4.3Norm-providing sources
    • 4.4Discussion
  • 5.Conclusion
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 6 February 2024
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/eww.23004.law
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