The sources for the historical reconstruction of African American English (AAE) are manifold, ranging from ex-slave narratives and interviews with hoodoo doctors to blues lyrics, and letters authored by semi-literates. The present article looks into the representation of AAE in a further source,… read more
Namibian English (NamE) is frequently referred to as an offspring of (White) South African English (SAfrE), although more recently researchers have tried to describe it as a variety in its own right. In particular, Kautzsch and Schröder (2016) describe several phonetic features seemingly specific… read more
Studies on the pronunciation of Namibian English (NamE) have shown strong evidence for ethnically conditioned variation within the NamE vowel system. Thus, NamE should not be seen as a monolithic entity but rather as a group of ethnically and/or socially conditioned varieties. In this paper, we… read more
The present study contrasts two subcorpora of the Corpus of Earlier African American English, one consisting of letters and one of transcribed speech with a view to determining the relative non-standardness of the language in both subcorpora. By using the set of features laid out in the Mouton… read more
The present chapter introduces the Corpus of Namibian Online Newspapers (CNamON), which encompasses the contents of seventeen news sources as available on the Internet from May to June 2016. These sources add up to roughly 44 million words of text. The corpus was compiled to facilitate taking a… read more
The ever-increasing dynamism of the diffusion of English calls for an integrated approach to postcolonial and non-postcolonial Englishes and to new contexts such as transnational cyberspace, new media, or “grassroots” usage. We focus on major theoretical approaches to modelling World Englishes in… read more
Even though Namibia was never under direct British rule, it has been a country with English as the de jure official language since 1990, the year of independence from South Africa. Surprisingly, the de facto role of English in Namibia has to date not been systematically and comprehensively… read more
Even if linguistic research (e.g. Berns 1988; Hilgendorf 2005) has claimed that the status of English in Germany might be changing from foreign language (EFL) to second language (ESL) status, or, for that matter, from an Expanding Circle to an Outer Circle English (e.g. Kachru 1985), empirical… read more