Areal features of Englishes in Asia?

Abstract

With English having spread in the world to regions whose languages exhibit areal features, an interesting question is whether any areal features can be identified for Englishes in a region, such as (South/east) Asia. This has been much less attended to than, e.g. attempting to identify features shared by, say, Outer Circle varieties or learner Englishes. Common features in an area can evolve, inter alia, (a) from shared or similar substrate influence or (b) from horizontal transmission. Where substrate influence is concerned, we argue that, of the few possible interesting candidates, perhaps only tone, which is a robust areal feature of South/east Asia, can be considered an areal feature of some Asian Englishes (AEs) in whose ecologies tonal languages are dominant. In both Singapore English and Hong Kong English, for instance, whose dominant substrates are tonal Sinitic languages, tone has been noted at word and phrase level and in particles. We discuss the important theoretical implications that this holds for the consideration of some varieties of English as tone languages rather than as stress/intonation languages, as well as for the assumption that tone, as an alleged ‘complex’ feature, may be lost in the evolution of new languages. Identifying features in AEs that have evolved by horizontal transmission due to geographical closeness is perhaps premature, since the endonormative stabilisation of many AEs is a relatively recent development (if at all). Nonetheless, such horizontal diffusion is something that is predicted in the future evolution of AEs, considering that speakers are increasingly using their own varieties to communicate in intra-Asian contexts. We suggest that a number of features, especially those more pragmatically dominant and/or susceptible to contact-induced diffusion are likely to spread – these include tone-based prosody and discourse particles – and make some preliminary observations of this.