"Cyber-Creole:" Jamaican Creole als Kontaktvarietät unter den Bedingungen globalisierter und computergestützter Kommunikation
Final Report Abstract
The project “Cyber-Creole: Jamaican Creole as a contact variety in globalised and mediated communication” [Jamaican Creole als Kontaktvarietät unter den Bedingungen globalisierter und computergestützter Kommunikation] investigated very large corpora (> 50 million words) of web-forum data produced by diasporic communities from Jamaica, Nigeria and – in an exploratory fashion – Cameroon. The amount and nature of the material necessitated the development of a new corpuslinguistic tool (N-CAT, “Net Corpora Adminstration Tool”), which combines data visualisation and geolocation analysis with more traditional corpuslinguistic techniques such as concordancing and textual statistics. The results of the research contribute to the following fields of research: (i) varieties of English / World Englishes research / pidgin and creole linguistics: structural description of orthographic, morphosyntactic and lexical features displayed by Jamaican Creole, Nigerian Pidgin and other nonstandard varieties when used on the web; critique of traditional models of World Englishes, which often focus too much on the linguistic legacy of colonialism and hence fail to account for the sociolinguistic dynamics of contemporary globalisation; (ii) discourse analysis of computer-mediated communication (CMC): description of the digital ethnolinguistic repertoires developed by web-based communities of practice; “deterritorialisation” of vernaculars in the social media; (iii) sociocultural linguistics, sociolinguistics of globalisation: impact of media and mobility on the spread of standard and nonstandard Englishes;linguistics of the “New African Diaspora”. Integrating these three layers of analysis, the project has made important contributions to corpus technology, to sociolinguistically informed corpus analysis, and to a deeper understanding of the status and functions of nonstandard Englishes in the world’s rapidly changing mediascapes and ethnoscapes (Appadurai). The “World System of Englishes” model proposed emerges directly form the results of the present project and is a long overdue step towards taking World Englishes out of the long shadow of colonialism and placing them at the core of the emerging research paradigm of the sociolinguistics of globalisation.
Publications
- “A vernacular on the move: Towards a sociolinguistics of mobility for Jamaican Creole.” Special issue on “Construction des connaissances sociolinguistiques,” vol. 1: “Variation et contexte social.” Cahiers de Linguistique 38/1 (2012): 87- 110
Lacoste, Véronique, und Christian Mair
- 2013. “The World System of Englishes: Accounting for the transnational importance of mobile and mediated vernaculars.” English World-Wide 34(3): 253-278
Mair, Christian
- 2013. “Using vernacular resources to create digital spaces: Towards a sociolinguistics of diasporic web forums.” In Peter Auer, Martin Hilpert, Anja Stukenbrock und Benedikt Szmrecsanyi, eds., Space in Language and Linguistics: Geographical, Interactional, and Cognitive Perspectives. Berlin: de Gruyter. 529-555
Mair, Christian, und Stefan Pfänder
- 2014. “Doing race and ethnicity in a digital community: Lexical labels and narratives of belonging in a Nigerian web forum.” Discourse, Context & Media 4/5: 38-47
Heyd, Theresa
(See online at https://doi.org/10.1016/j.dcm.2013.11.002) - 2014. “From vernacular to digital ethnolinguistic repertoire: The case of Nigerian Pidgin.” In Véronique Lacoste, Jakob Leimgruber und Thiemo Breyer, eds., Indexing Authenticity. Berlin: de Gruyter. 244-268
Heyd, Theresa, und Christian Mair
- 2015. Jamaican Creole Goes Web: Sociolinguistic Styling and Authenticity in a Digital ‘Yaad’. Creole Language Library 49. Amsterdam: Benjamins
Moll, Andrea
- 2015. “Beyond ‘grammar’ and ‘phonetics’: The metacommunicative lexicon of Nigerian Pidgin.” World Englishes 34(4)
Heyd, Theresa
(See online at https://doi.org/10.1111/weng.12164) - 2015. “From Naija to Chitown: The New African Diaspora and digital representations of place.” Discourse, Context & Media
Heyd, Theresa, und Mirka Honkanen
(See online at https://doi.org/10.1016/j.dcm.2015.06.001)
