At the interface of contact linguistics and SLA research: World Englishes and Learner Englishes compared

This presentation aims to explore the interface between two types of varieties of the English language. The first type includes contact-based varieties of English that developed in former British or American colonies (e.g. Singapore, India) and that still have important functions in these countries as an official or semi-official language. These varieties are variously referred to as ‘World Englishes’, ‘New Englishes’, ‘Postcolonial Englishes’ or ‘Indigenized varieties of English’ and correspond to the Outer Circle in Kachru’s (1985) well-known model of the three concentric circles. The second type of varieties that will be investigated covers the foreign learner varieties that have been the focus of second language acquisition (SLA) research. Called ‘Learner English’ or, more recently, ‘Learner Englishes’ (to emphasize the heterogeneity of learner language; see Gilquin & Granger 2011: 74), these varieties belong to the Expanding Circle in Kachru’s model. Despite the intuitive similarities between these two types of varieties and despite an early call by Sridhar & Sridhar (1986) to bridge the paradigm gap between SLA and the theories of World Englishes, there has been very little communication between the two fields up until recently. Publications like Nesselhauf (2009), Mukherjee & Hundt (2011) and Davydova (2012), however, have demonstrated both the feasibility and desirability of comparisons between the Outer and Expanding Circles, and have thus paved the way for further explorations. Using corpus data from ICE (Greenbaum 1996) for World Englishes and from ICLE (Granger et al. 2009) and LINDSEI (Gilquin et al. 2010) for Learner Englishes, I will follow this path and examine the behaviour of several items, including syntactic, lexical and phraseological phenomena, in World Englishes and Learner Englishes, bringing to light the similarities that emerge from these comparisons and trying to explain them by reference to general cognitive principles of language acquisition (and language change) such as simplification, generalisation, redundancy or analogy (see Schneider 2012). The implications of a rapprochement between the two fields of research, together with a possible symbiosis between their terminological and theoretical apparatus, will also be discussed, as well as the potential links with other types of varieties like dialects, pidgins/creoles or English as a Lingua Franca