Translocality in the anglophone Caribbean: Regional, global and transnational aspects in standards of English

Basic data for this project

Description

The present project investigates standards of English in the anglophone Caribbean. To the extent that thesehave been considered at all in English linguistics, research has concentrated on the national level, whichcorresponds to the focus of research on standard varieties of English in general. However, in view of growingconnections beyond the national level this approach is too limited, especially when dealing with relatively tovery small states as are characteristic of the anglophone Caribbean. The present project does take thenational level as a basis, also including small states that previous research on standard varieties of English inthe Caribbean has completely ignored, but at the same time it investigates regional and global tendencies aswell as the influence on standard language use of speakers and writers with transnational biographies. Thus it takes into account different scales of space, utilizing the concept of translocality, which has so far been given little consideration in linguistics. The empirical research deals with written as well as spoken English andcovers media (newspapers, news broadcasts) and education (specifically secondary education, years 10-13).In these domains both language use and language attitudes are analysed, using a combination of corpuslinguistic and sociolinguistic methods.