VARIETIES OF ENGLISH

 

American and Canadian English. The dialect regions of the United States are most clearly marked along the Atlantic littoral, where the earlier settlements were made. Three dialects can be defined: Northern, Midland, and Southern. Each has its subdialects.

The Northern dialect is spoken in New England. Its six chief subdialects comprise northeastern New England (Maine, New Hampshire, and eastern Vermont), south­eastern New England (eastern Massachusetts, eastern Connecticut, and Rhode Island), southwestern New England (western Massachusetts and western Connecti­cut), the inland north (western Vermont and upstate New York), the Hudson Valley, and metropolitan New York.

The Midland dialect is spoken in the coastal region from Point Pleasant, in New Jersey, to Dover, in Delaware. Its seven major subdialects comprise the Delaware Val­ley, the Susquehanna Valley, the Upper Ohio Valley, northern West Virginia, the Upper Potomac and Shen-andoah, southern West Virginia and eastern Kentucky, western Carolina, and eastern Tennessee.

The Southern Dialect area covers the coastal region from Delaware to South Carolina. Its five chief sub-dialects comprise the Delmarva Peninsula, the Virginia Piedmont, northeastern North Carolina (Albemarle Sound and Neuse Valley), Cape Fear and Pee Dee val­leys, and the South Carolina Low Country, around Charleston.

These boundaries, based on those of the Linguistic Atlas of the United States and Canada, are highly tentative. To some extent these regions preserve the traditional speech of southeastern and southern England, where most of the early colonists were born. The first settlers who came to Virginia (1607) and Massachusetts (1620) soon learned to adapt old words to new uses, but they were content to borrow names from the local Indian lan­guages for unknown trees, such as hickory and persimmon, and for unfamiliar animals, such as raccoons and woodchucks.

Later they took words from foreign set-|tiers: "chowder" and "prairie" from the French, "scow" and "sleigh" from the Dutch. They made new compounds, such as "backwoods" and "bullfrog," and gave new meanings to such words as "lumber" (which in Brit­ish English denotes disused furniture, or junk) and "corn" (which in British English signifies any grain, especially wheat).

Before the Declaration of Independence (1776), two-thirds of the immigrants had come from England, but after that date they arrived in large numbers from Ire­land. The potato famine of 1845 drove 1,500,000 Irishmen to seek homes in the New.World, and the European revolutions of 1848 drove as many Germans to settle in Pennsylvania and the Middle West. After the close of the American Civil War, millions of Scandinavians, Slavs, and Italians crossed the ocean and eventually set­tled mostly in the North Central and Upper Midwest states. In some areas of South Carolina and Georgia the American Negroes who had been imported to work the rice and cotton plantations developed a contact language called Gullah, or Geechee, that made use of many struc­tural and lexical features of their native languages. This remarkable variety of English is comparable to such "contact languages" as Sranan (Taki-Taki) and Melane-sian Pidgin. The speech of the Atlantic Seaboard shows far greater differences in pronunciation, grammar, and vocabulary than that of any area in the North Central States, the Upper Midwest, the Rocky Mountains, or the Pacific Coast. Today, urbanization, quick transport, and television have tended to level out some dialectal differ­ences in the United States.

The boundary with Canada nowhere corresponds to any boundary between dialects, and the influence of United States English is strong, being felt least in the Maritime Provinces and Newfoundland. Nevertheless, in spite of the effect of this proximity to the United States, British influences are still potent in some of the larger cities; Scottish influences are well sustained in Ontario. Canada remains bilingual. One-third of its people, living mostly in the province of Quebec, have French as their home language. Those provinces in which French is spoken as a mother tongue by 10 percent or more of the population are described as "federal bilingual districts" in the Offi­cial Languages Bill of 1968.

Australian and New Zealand English. Unlike Canada, Australia has no European language other than English within its borders. There are still many Aboriginal lan­guages, though they are spoken by only a few hundred speakers each and their continued existence is threatened. Over 90 percent of the population is Bjitish. By the mid-20th century, with rapid decline of its Aboriginal tongues, English was without rivals in Australia.

During colonial times the new settlers had to find names for a fauna and flora (e.g., banksia, iron bark, whee whee) different from anything previously known to them: trees that shed bark instead of leaves and cherries with ex­ternal stones. The words brush, bush, creek, paddock, and scrub acquired wider senses, whereas the terms brook, dale, field, forest, and meadow were seldom used. A creek leading out of a river and entering it again down­stream was called an anastomizing branch (a term from anatomy), or an anabranch, whereas a creek" coming to a dead end was called by its native name, a billabong. The giant kingfisher with its raucous bray was long referred to as a laughing jackass, later as a bushman's clock, but now it is a kookaburra. Cattle so intractable that only roping could control them were said to be ropable, a term now used as a synonym for "angry" or "extremely annoyed."

A deadbeat was a penniless "sundowner" at the very end of his tether, and a no-hoper was an incompetent fellow, hopeless and helpless. An offsider (strictly, the offside driver of a bullock team) was any assistant or Partner. A rouseabout was first an odd-job man on a sheep station and then any kind of handyman. He was, in fact, the "down-under" counterpart of the wharf la­bourer, or roustabout, on the Mississippi River. Both words originated in Cornwall, and many other terms, now exclusively Australian, came ultimately from British dialects. "Dinkum," for instance, meaning "true, au­thentic, genuine," echoed the "fair dinkum," or fair deal, of Lincolnshire dialect. "Fossicking" about for surface gold, and then rummaging about in general, perpetuated the term fossick ("to elicit information, ferret out the facts") from the Cornish dialect of English. To "bar­rack," or jeer noisily, recalled Irish "barrack" ("to brag, boast"), whereas "skerrick" in the phrase "not a skerrick left" was obviously identical with the "skerrick" meaning "small fragment, particle," still heard in English dialects from Westmorland to Hampshire.

Some Australian English terms came from Aboriginal speech: the words boomerang, corroboree (warlike dance and then any large and noisy gathering), dingo (reddish-brown half-domesticated dog), galah (cockatoo), gunyah (bush hut), kangaroo, karri (dark-red eucalyptus tree), nonda (rosaceous tree yielding edible fruit), pokutukawa (evergreen bearing brilliant blossom), wallaby (small marsupial), and wallaroo (large rock kangaroo). Aus­tralian English has slower rhythms and flatter intonations than RP. Although there is remarkably little regional variation throughout the entire continent, there is signi­ficant social variation.

Although New Zealand lies over 1,000 miles away, much of the English spoken there is similar to that of Australia. The blanket term Austral English is sometimes used to cover the language of the whole of Australasia, or Southern Asia, but this term is far from popular with New Zealanders because it makes no reference to New Zealand and gives all the prominence, so they feel, to Australia. Between North and South Islands there are observable differences. For one thing, Maori, which is still a living language (related to Tahitian, Hawaiian, and the other Austronesian [Malayo-Polynesian] languages), has a greater number of speakers and more influence in North Island.

 

The English of India-Pakistan. In 1950 India became a federal republic within the Commonwealth of Nations, and Hindi was declared the first national language. En­glish, it was stated, would "continue to be used for all official purposes until 1965." In 1967, however, by the terms of the English Language Amendment Bill, English was proclaimed "an alternative official or associate language with Hindi until such time as all non-Hindi states had agreed to its being dropped." English is there­fore acknowledged to be indispensable. It is the only practicable means of day-to-day communication between the central government at New Delhi and states with non-Hindi speaking populations, especially with the Deccan, or "South," where millions speak Dravidian (non-Indo-European) languages—Telugu, Tamil, Kan-nada, and Malayalam. English is widely used in business, and, although its use as a medium in higher education is decreasing, it remains the principal language of scien­tific research.

In 1956 Pakistan became an autonomous republic com­prising two states, East and West. Bengali and Urdu were made the national languages of East and West Pakistan, respectively, but English was adopted as a third official language and functioned as the medium of interstate communication. (In 1971 East Pakistan broke away from its western partner and became the independent state of Bangladesh.)

African English. Africa is the most multilingual area in the world, if people are measured against languages. Upon a large number of indigenous languages rests a slowly changing superstructure of world languages (Ar­abic, English, French, and Portuguese). The problems of language are everywhere linked with political, social, economic, and educational factors.

The Republic of South Africa, the oldest British settle­ment in the continent, resembles Canada in having two recognized European languages within its borders: En­glish and Afrikaans, or Cape Dutch. Both British and Dutch traders followed in the wake of 15th-century Portuguese explorers and have lived in widely varying
war-and-peace relationships ever since. Although the Union of South Africa, comprising Cape Province, Transvaal, Natal, and Orange Free State, was for over
a half century (1910-61) a member of the British Empire and Commonwealth, its four prime ministers (Botha, Smuts, Hertzog, and Malan) were all Dutchmen. In 1970 Afrikaners outnumbered Britishers by 3 to 2. The Afrikaans language began to diverge seriously from Eu­ropean Dutch in the late 18th century and has gradually
come to be recognized as a separate language. Although the English spoken in South Africa differs in some re­spects from standard British English, its speakers do not
Afrikaner- regard the language as a separate one. They have natural­
isms in ly come to use many Afrikanerisms, such as kloof,
South kopje, krans, veld, and vlei, to denote features of the African landscape and occasionally employ Bantu names to desig-English nate local animals and plants. The words trek and com­mando, notorious in South African history, have ac­quired almost worldwide currency.

Elsewhere in Africa, English helps to answer the needs of wider communication. It functions as the official lan­guage of administration in the Bantu states of Botswana, Lesotho, and Swaziland and in Rhodesia, Zambia, Malawi, Burundi, Rwanda, Uganda, and Kenya. The University of East Africa, inaugurated in 1963, has three interstate constituent colleges in which the language of instruction is English, at Kampala (Makerere), Ugan­da; at Nairobi, Kenya; and at Dar es Salaam, Tanzania.

The West African states of Gambia, Sierra Leone, Ghana, and Nigeria, independent members of the Com­monwealth, have English as their official language. They are all multilingual. The official language-of Liberia is also English, although its tribal communities constitute four different linguistic groups. Its leading citizens re­gard themselves as Americo-Liberians, being descendants of those freed Negroes whose first contingents arrived in West Africa in 1822. South of the Sahara Desert, in­digenous languages are extending their domains and are competing healthily and vigorously with French and En­glish.

 

 

LITERATURE

 

1. Aspects of British and American Life. Texts for reading and discussion. – Minsk, 2001.

2. Global Issues of Contemporaneity. – Мн., МГЛУ, 1998.

3. Joh and Liz Soars. Headway (advanced). – Oxford University Press. 1997.

4. Klimkovich, Tokareva I. Advanced Reader in Cross-Cultural Studies. Contexts for critical reading and discussion. Part 1. – Minsk, 1994.

5. Горизонты. Тексты для чтения и творческих презентаций. – Минск, «Лексис», 2002.