122223 SE Linguistics Seminar / BA Paper + MA (2020S)

'World Englishes' has emerged as a new paradigm in the description of English. But it is not without its controversies. With data for many national varieties now available through the International Corpus of English, systematic comparison supposedly at a relatively standardised level has never been easier. But how far does corpus-based description across Englishes adequately account for the linguistic situation or the language repertoire of individuals in countries where English is an L2 or additional language? How far, in a world of now intense globalisation, widespread travel and tourism, and immediate online communication, are the language worlds of plurlingual individuals adequately accounted for simply on the basis of descriptive comparison? This new textbook, by Lange & Leuckert (2020), will introduce us to corpus approaches to world Englishes. The challenge of the seminar is to reconcile such descriptive approaches with the growing number of theoretical models which seek to explain the evolving nature of English as the world's most widely used language, both spoken and written.