Overview

This book offers an in-depth analysis of several features of spoken Indian English that are generally considered as ‘typical’, but have never before been studied empirically. Drawing on authentic spoken data from the International Corpus of English, Indian component, the book focuses on the domain of discourse organization and examines the form, function and distribution of invariant tags such as isn’t it and no/na, non-initial existential there, focus markers only and itself, topicalization and left-dislocation. By focusing on multilingual speakers’ interactions, the study demonstrates conclusively that spoken Indian English bears all the hallmarks of a vibrant contact language, testifying to a pan-South Asian ‘grammar of culture’ which becomes apparent in contact-induced language change in spoken Indian English. The book will be highly relevant for anyone interested in postcolonial varieties of English, contact linguistics, standardization, and discourse-pragmatic sentence structure.

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9789027249050

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Lange's book is highly recommendable for anybody interested in variational linguistics in general and the development of IndE in particular. It shows how the use of frequently neglected sociolinguistic speaker profiles contained in ICE corpora can add to the discussion of variational development, even if the author does not make full use of these additional data. Furthermore, the focus on spoken discourse organization with its repercussions on the developing norms and standards of IndE make it unique within the body of literature on IndE, which has all too frequently focused on lexical innovations or has mainly dealt with written data. -- Marco Schilk, University of Hildesheim, in English World-Wide Vol. 36:3. pp. 348-355 (2015).

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