Revisiting the vowels of Brunei English  

Oleh:

SHARBAWI, SALBRINA

Jenis: Article from Journal - ilmiah internasional
Dalam koleksi: World Englishes (Full Text) vol. 31 no. 2 (Jun. 2012), page 177-197.
Fulltext: p. 177-197.pdf (882.72KB)

Isi artikel

This paper presents findings of a phonetic investigation of the 11 monophthongal vowels produced by 18 speakers of Brunei English (BrunE). Data for the current study was also collected from 12 Singapore English (SgE) speakers. In order to avoid a prescriptive approach, the description of the vowels was carried out using a modified inventory of vowel contrasts for the monophthongs following Wells’ model of standard lexical sets. The findings revealed that BrunE speakers are inconsistent in their vowel productions in which there is indeterminate usage of American English (AmE) and BrE vowels. The Singaporeans, however, show more uniformity across the subjects. It is proposed that the lack of consistency in BrunE vowel pronunciations may be explained in terms of the maturity of the English varieties. Whereas Schneider places SgE in an advanced phase 4 of his dynamic model of the evolution of postcolonial Englishes, the findings of the current study seems to indicate that BrunE belongs in the third phase. Statistical tests, however, do not seem to support the claim that BrunE and SgE are in different stages of development. It is also concluded that use of the lexical keywords may not be feasible in the description of an emerging English variety since the lexical sets are fixed and are based on the pronunciation of an Inner Circle variety. As such, an improvised lexical keyword set has been proposed for the description of BrunE vowels.MCPl

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