Research Focus

English in a postcolonial world
The research focus at the Chair of English Linguistics at LMU Munich is on varieties of English, and more specifically on postcolonial varieties, i.e., those forms of English which developed in overseas locations in North America, the Caribbean, Africa, Asia, and the Pacific during the colonial period, roughly from the early 17th to the late 19th centuries, in situations involving heavy language and dialect contact. Depending on the kinds of English input, the demographic and social relationships between the speakers in contact, and the larger socioeconomic conditions in the colonies, different variety types emerged.

Variety types: New Englishes, pidgins, and creoles
There are, first, overseas varieties of English that emerged out of contact between speakers of different non-standard dialects in settler colonies such as the United States or Australia. Second, there are the so-called “New Englishes,” i.e., varieties showing a strong influence of the regional background languages and functioning as a second language in education, the media, business, and politics in linguistically diverse countries such as Singapore. These varieties are becoming increasingly autonomous and have sometimes developed standards of their own. Third, there are pidgins and creoles. The former are reduced languages which arise when groups of people need to communicate with each other for some specific purpose such as trade but do not share a language. Creoles, by contrast, are full-fledged, natural languages that emerged when people of different ethnic, linguistic, and sociocultural backgrounds came together in new communities, often under conditions of forced labor and/or slavery in former plantation colonies. Creoles are spoken as native languages and are capable of fulfilling any communicative function they are put to by their speakers. Nevertheless, most of them still do not possess overt prestige and are restricted to spoken, informal interaction. Well-known English-lexifier creoles include Jamaican Creole, or Patwa, and Hawai’i Creole English, which is locally known as Pidgin.

Standard English(es): Local, global, emerging
In addition to such non-standard varieties of English, there are standard ones as well. Whereas in former times, only one standard was overtly acknowledged (“Others may speak and read English – more or less – but it is our language not theirs. It was made in England by the English”), today there are two global, or metropolitan, standards, i.e., American English and British English. In a number of postcolonial countries, however, these global standards are being renounced in favor of local ones, and a number of researchers have turned to the investigation of the social and linguistic processes involved in the emergence of these new standards.

Methods: Fieldwork, corpora, quantitative analysis
The study of varieties of English is always based on real, authentic, naturally occurring data. This often involves fieldwork, during which recordings are made, which are then transcribed and analyzed, both qualitatively and quantitatively. The study of standard varieties of English is often facilitated by the availability of large, computer-readable collections of texts, i.e., corpora, such as the International Corpus of English (ICE) or the Corpus of Global Web-based English (GloWbE). Corpus linguistics necessitates sophisticated computer and statistical skills.

The broader context: Language variation and change, sociolinguistics
The study of varieties of English is often linked with another subfield of linguistics entitled “language variation and change,” which researches the links between synchronic linguistic variation and diachronic language change. Variation affects all levels of language and must be considered a prerequisite for change; such change is often driven by social factors but constrained by structural, i.e., language-internal, factors. In this sense, all of the above-described approaches are part of an even larger field of linguistics, i.e., sociolinguistics, which studies the interface between language and society, including the effects that social factors such as age, gender, education, membership in a particular social group, or situation have on language as well as the effects of language use on society.

For how individual projects at the Chair of English Linguistics at LMU Munich relate to the fields just outlined, please see Projects, PhD Dissertations and Theses supervised