The Use of American and British Lexis in Brunei English

In pronunciation, influenced by American English, a shift in Brunei English can be observed in the increasing use of [r] in tokens such as car and heard particularly among younger speakers whose pronunciation may be influenced by American English. In contrast, older speakers tend to omit the [r] sound in these tokens as their pronunciation may be more influenced by British English. However, it is unclear whether American English has influenced the vocabulary of Brunei English speakers as the education system in Brunei favours British English due to its historical ties with Britain. This paper analyses the use of American and British lexical items between three age groups: 20 in-service teachers aged between 29 to 35 years old, 20 university undergraduates aged between 19 to 25 years old, and 20 secondary school students who are within the 11 to 15 age range. Each age group has 10 female and 10 male participants and they were asked to name seven objects shown to them on Power point slides. Their responses were recorded and compared between the age groups and between female and male data. The analysis is supplemented with recorded data from interviews with all 60 participants to determine instances of American and British lexical items in casual speech. It was found that there is a higher occurrence of American than British lexical items in all three groups and the interview data supports the findings in the main data. Thus, providing further evidence for the Americanisation of Brunei English and that Brunei English is undergoing change.

Varieties of English language in Lexical, Grammatical and Spelling Domain in Bosnian Highschool Context

Classified as a Germanic language and evidently a common language, a lingua franca of the world, after years of development, English has formed a number of varieties differing in many areas, including vocabulary, pronunciation, spelling, grammar, and in some cases, accent. As a result of its widespread, it is crucial to know which variety is used, yet preferred by learners, and observe differences between them. Therefore, the current study aimed to examine the two most commonly used, often mixed, varieties of English, namely American English and British English, in one high school in central Bosnia and Herzegovina. Moreover, we aimed , to see whether students are aware of the significant differences in spelling, vocabulary, and grammatical structure. In doing so, 50 randomly selected high school students were given a test consisting of written differences related to lexical items, spelling, as well as differences visible in grammar. The findings revealed that the majority of participants prefer British English, though they are not totally aware of the differences in the mentioned areas between these two varieties; as a result, they are frequently mixing them. Lacking knowledge about these two primary varieties of English would, undeniably in some cases, lead to misunderstanding; thus, teachers should pay more attention and give more effort to raise the learners’ awareness of different varieties and their distinctive aspects.

Lexico-semantic relativity and versatility in translation and intercultural communication

The aim of the article is to discuss translation regularities in correlations of words that denote culture-related phenomena that exist in many cultures or that are specific to certain cultures and languages. The focus is on Russian and English culturonyms. The authors dwell on the principle of functional dualism that claims that language can equally address internal and external cultures. This principle is developed in the new linguistic discipline termed interlinguoculturology (Kabakchi 1998, Kabakchi Beloglazova 2020). Nonetheless, under the impact of the World Englishes paradigm, the article points to blurring the concept of external culture - Russian bilinguals, speaking or writing in Russian English, use this variety for expressing their own culture; the same is true for other world Englishes that have branched from the prototypical British English model. Despite the polemical relations of the two research schools, which are close and yet different in some of their tenets, there is much in common in their semantic and pragmatic research of how varieties of English adapt and domesticate culturonyms, in particular binary words belonging to two languages and often associated with each other in translation. The paper discusses examples of binary polyonyms (universal culturonyms) whose meaning depends on the context of the situation and, therefore, is differently received in diverse cultures; binary analogues whose equivalent selection is based on scrutinizing the dictionary entry and on the knowledge of the cultural background, and binary interonyms that partly help translators and partly interfere with their work, being deceptive cognates differing in their referential or connotational meanings. The article concludes that the interpretation of culture-bound words in foreign-culture-oriented texts depends on various pragmatic and semantic processes and is grounded in a word semantic flexibility and its matter-of-course adaptation in a cultural and language environment.

Is There a Foreign Accent Effect on Moral Judgment?

Recent studies have shown that people make more utilitarian decisions when dealing with a moral dilemma in a foreign language than in their native language. Emotion, cognitive load, and psychological distance have been put forward as explanations for this foreign language effect. The question that arises is whether a similar effect would be observed when processing a dilemma in one’s own language but spoken by a foreign-accented speaker. Indeed, foreign-accented speech has been shown to modulate emotion processing, to disrupt processing fluency and to increase psychological distance due to social categorisation. We tested this hypothesis by presenting 435 participants with two moral dilemmas, the trolley dilemma and the footbridge dilemma online, either in a native accent or a foreign accent. In Experiment 1, 184 native Spanish speakers listened to the dilemmas in Spanish recorded by a native speaker, a British English or a Cameroonian native speaker. In Experiment 2, 251 Dutch native speakers listened to the dilemmas in Dutch in their native accent, in a British English, a Turkish, or in a French accent. Results showed an increase in utilitarian decisions for the Cameroonian- and French-accented speech compared to the Spanish or Dutch native accent, respectively. When collapsing all the speakers from the two experiments, a similar increase in the foreign accent condition compared with the native accent condition was observed. This study is the first demonstration of a foreign accent effect on moral judgements, and despite the variability in the effect across accents, the findings suggest that a foreign accent, like a foreign language, is a linguistic context that modulates (neuro)cognitive mechanisms, and consequently, impacts our behaviour. More research is needed to follow up on this exploratory study and to understand the influence of factors such as emotion reduction, cognitive load, psychological distance, and speaker’s idiosyncratic features on moral judgments.

Regional variation in British English voice quality

This study considers regional variation of voice quality in two varieties of British English – Southern Standard British English and West Yorkshire English. A comparison of voice quality profiles for three closely related but not identical northern varieties within West Yorkshire is also considered. Our findings do not contradict the small subset of previous research which explored regional and/or social variation in voice quality in British English insofar as regionality may play a small role in a speaker’s voice quality profile. However, factors such as social standing and identity could perhaps be even more relevant. Even when considering homogeneous groups of speakers, it is not the case that there is a cohesive voice quality profile that can be attached to every speaker within the group. The reason for this, we argue, is the speaker-specificity inherent in voice quality.

Mechanisms of Grammaticalization in the Variation of Negative Question Tags

This paper presents an investigation of the extent to which Heine’s (2003) mechanisms of grammaticalization—erosion (phonetic reduction), decategorialization (loss of morpho-syntactic properties), desemanticization (semantic bleaching) and extension (context expansion)—are evident in the variation of negative question tags in three varieties of British English spoken in Glasgow, Tyneside, and Salford. The study considers the variation in terms of three types of variant—full (e.g., isn’t it), reduced (e.g., int it), and coalesced (e.g., innit)—which each represent a stage in the erosion process. Quantitative variationist analysis of informal conversational data shows that erosion of negative tags occurs to different degrees in each of the three communities. The locality with the least tag erosion—Tyneside—displays particularly strong social stratification in the variation that suggests a change in progress led by younger men. However, there is little to no evidence of decategorialization in the negative tags, nor does variation in tag meaning correlate with phonetic form in a consistent manner. The results therefore suggest that erosion and desemanticization/extension do not occur in lockstep as these constructions grammaticalize, while decategorialization occurs at a later stage in the change.