After English was planted in numerous (often multilingual) communities around Asia, the language continued to evolve locally and developed various innovative features as a response to the communicative needs of its new users. Over the years, many of these Englishes have become nativized, that is, they have developed local feature profiles that are unique for each variety.
Today, many of these New Englishes have the status of an official language in the countries where they developed, and they are often spoken as a second language by the majority of the population.
One of the largest speaker populations of these New Englishes is located in India, where English is one of the official languages. Previous studies show that this local, nativized variety of English, Indian English (IndE), has already become prominent in the region to the extent that it is able to influence the development of other English varieties spoken in South Asia – in other words, it has become a linguistic epicentre. However, no research has been conducted to see whether this influence could have spread further, to the varieties spoken in Southeast Asia. This is the aim of the present study.
The Asian varieties included in this article-based dissertation are the Englishes spoken in India, Singapore (SinE), Hong Kong (HKE) and the Philippines (PhiE). The first three countries are former British colonies while the fourth is a former American colony and therefore, British (BrE) and American (AmE) varieties are also included in the study for points of reference.
The choice of the three Southeast Asian countries is based on their differing connections with India. Singapore is a country that has a sizeable Indian ethnic minority, it has maintained close connections with India since colonial times, and it is geographically closest to India when compared with the other two Southeast Asian countries examined here. While Hong Kong also shares India’s past as a former British colony, it lacks a significant Indian minority, strong historical connections, and geographical proximity with India. The Philippines in turn was never connected to India through the British colonial empire, the size of its Indian minority is negligible, and it is geographically furthest away from India. Because of these factors, the present study hypothesises that if there is any sign of IndE extending its epicentric influence to Southeast Asia, it would most likely be detected in SinE and possibly in HKE, but not in PhiE.
The potential epicentric role of IndE in Southeast Asia is studied through the use of three syntactic features, all of which previous studies have shown to be local innovations in IndE and which have also been noted to exist in some of the Southeast Asian varieties included in this study. The features examined here include the use of clause-final also and only, the use of the invariant tag isn’t it and the tendency to omit direct objects, and each feature is examined in a separate article included in this article-based dissertation. The study focuses mainly on the use of these features in spoken language where syntactic innovations often occur most frequently.
While the majority of the data comes from the International Corpus of English (ICE), a family of corpora that has comparable data on a large number of varieties of English, the Freiburg-Brown Corpus of American English and Santa Barbara Corpus of Spoken American English were also used in some occasions when comparable data were not available in ICE.
The results of the study show that all three syntactic features are used most frequently in IndE, which for all three features is followed by SinE and, depending on the feature, by HKE or PhiE. An investigation into the major substrates of each variety shows that while for IndE the substrate effect is the most plausible explanation for the existence of the feature in the variety, for the three Southeast Asian varieties, the situation is more complex. Interestingly, for SinE and possibly HKE the influence of IndE is a factor that could help explain the results of the two varieties more comprehensively, whereas for PhiE, no indication of IndE’s influence could be detected. Therefore, the results of the study lend cautious support to the argument that IndE could have extended its influence on some Southeast Asian varieties, namely SinE.
In order to explain what could have caused this, the study also presents a detailed investigation of the historical, cultural, economic, linguistic and social connections between India and the three Southeast Asian countries; special attention is payed to the Indian minorities in each country, including their numbers, L1s, occupational profiles, social standings, and their connections with India. Interestingly, the results of this investigation mirror the pattern that emerges from the corpus studies presented in the three articles: the closer the connections a Southeast Asian country has with India, the closer its use of the studied features are in relation to those of IndE. Therefore, there is socio-historical evidence that supports the hypothesis of IndE functioning as an emerging epicentre for some of the English varieties spoken in Southeast Asia.
The fourth and final article included in this study uses the apparent-time method to examine how established one of the features, the use of clause-final also and only, is in IndE, HKE and PhiE (for this article, SinE had to be excluded due to the lack of metadata in the ICE-corpus). The results of this investigation indicate that the feature is more established in IndE, where it is used more by older and male speakers, whereas in HKE and PhiE the feature is used more by younger and female speakers, which in turn suggests that the feature has been taken up more recently in the two varieties. Therefore, it seems that, at least in the case of clause-final also and only, the use of the innovative feature in IndE predates those of HKE and PhiE and hence, the results lend support to the argument that IndE could have contributed to the growing use of the feature in some Southeast Asian varieties.
As the results of the present study show, there is some evidence that supports the idea that IndE has extended its influence to some of the English varieties spoken in Southeast Asia. For the varieties included here, the evidence appears to be strongest for SinE, while for HKE the results seem inconclusive, though the possibility of IndE’s influence could not be excluded completely. For PhiE, there seems to be no indication of IndE’s influence and thus, the results align with the original hypothesis of this study.
The doctoral dissertation of M.A. Hanna Parviainen in the field of English philology titled Crossing the Borders: The Influence of Indian English in the Southeast Asian Region will be publicly examined in the Faculty of Information Technology and Communication Sciences at Tampere University starting at 12 o'clock on Friday 11 September 2020. The Opponent will be Professor Devyani Sharma from Queen Mary University. The Custos will be Professor Juhani Klemola from Tampere University.
The event can be followed via remote connection, Zoom, meeting ID 617 3960 7341. (In case the first connection would not work well, another connection will be used.)
The dissertation is available online at
http://urn.fi/URN:ISBN:978-952-03-1645-7