The English in Ghana: British, American or Hybrid English?

The Inner Circle vs. the Outer Circle or British English vs. American English

In this paper, the use of two modals (can and may) in four varieties of English (British, India, Philippines, and USA) was compared and the characteristics of each variety were statistically analyzed. After all the sample sentences were extracted from each component of the ICE corpus, a total of twenty linguistic factors were encoded. Then, the collected data were statistically analyzed with R....

Beyond North American English: modelling vowel inherent spectral change in British English and Dutch

Theories and methods modelling vowel quality in terms of vowel inherent spectral change (VISC) have been developed and tested overwhelmingly on North American English (AE) dialects, which raises the question of their generalisability in non-AE dialects and other languages. The present paper examines VISC as an aspect of vowel quality in Standard Southern British English (SSBE) and Northern Stan...

Spanish listeners' perception of American and Southern British English vowels.

L2 studies demonstrate that learners differ in their speech perception patterns. Recent explanations attribute this variation to the different initial stages with which learners start their L2 development. Spanish listeners' categorization of Standard Southern British English and American English vowels is compared. The results show that, on the basis of steady-state F1 and F2 values, listeners...

The ( North ) American English

Uptalk in Southern British English

The present study deals with the realization and function of uptalk in Southern British English (SBE), a variety in which the use of uptalk has been little investigated. Eight speakers (4 male, 4 female) were recorded while taking part in a Map Task and playing a board game. All speakers used uptalk for a variety of functions, but mostly for declaratives particularly to indicate floor holding b...