The contribution is a plea for closer co-operation between sociolinguistics and corpus linguistics in the study of World Englishes, supporting the case with the author’s own findings from the recently completed Jamaican component of the International Corpus of English (ICE-JA). The variables analysed are the use of person(s) as a synonym for people, subject-verb inversion in questions, the modals of obligation and necessity, negative and auxiliary contraction, and the “new” quotative be like. It is a particular advantage of the corpus-linguistic working environment provided by ICE that many of these issues can be studied in a cross-variety, comparative perspective. On the whole, present-day Jamaican English turns out to be rather different from British English, its historical “parent” variety.

The paper argues for a closer collaboration between corpus linguists and grammaticalisation theorists. Corpora have a number of benefits: First, they make it possible to study incipient or ongoing processes of grammaticalisation. Secondly, a quantitative-cum-qualitative analysis of corpus data makes it possible to shed light on important theoretical issues. Thirdly, corpora allow a better take on the textlinguistic, genre and discourse factors relevant to grammaticalisation. The general points made are illustrated with data provided in the digitally accessible quotation base of the OED. On the basis of the evidence, I propose a distinction between two types of grammaticalisation, a “dynamic” one, which is reflected in massive shifts of frequency, and a “static” one, which can be characterised as the occasional use of lexical items in grammatical function.

The study of “varieties of English around the world”, the “New Englishes” or “World Englishes” emerged at the intersection of dialectology, sociolinguistics and historical linguistics in the early 1980s and has become one of the most vibrant sub-fields of English linguistics. Work in this tradition has made an enormous contribution to our understanding of the linguistic aftermath of colonialism. Among its lasting legacies is the simple and elegant classification of World Englishes into the Inner, Outer and Expanding Circles proposed by Kachru (1992 [1982]).What has not been studied in equal depth (yet) are the non-traditional avenues for the spread of standard and vernacular varieties of English that have been opened up through more recent aspects of globalisation, such as the new migrations starting after the end of the Cold War, the entertainment industry or the revolution in communication brought about by the participatory web. Many of these phenomena elude description within the “Three Circles” model and require a re-positioning of World Englishes research in the context of the “sociolinguistics of globalisation” (Blommaert 2010; Coupland 2010). In order to demonstrate the potential of such a rapprochement, the present study explores the use of the African American rhetorical device of augmentation in a Nigerian diasporic community.

Contrasts between British and American usage were an important topic in computer-aided corpus linguistics from the very start. The present contribution shows how from these beginnings the scope of corpus-based research was successively extended to cover standard varieties of the New Englishes (e.g. in the International Corpus of English) and eventually also non-standard and vernacular varieties, so that today the corpus-linguistic approach has become an important complement to sociolinguistics in the study of variation in the New Englishes. From a general discussion of this development, the contribution moves on to present the ‘Corpus of Cyber-Jamaican’ (CCJ), a large web-derived corpus of diasporic Jamaican web forums, and shows in a number of exploratory studies how this new resource can be used to investigate the globalisation of vernacular features.

We investigate variable usage in specificational cleft sentences of the types All I did was help / to help / I helped him find a new job. Previous research identified a drift away from the marked and towards the unmarked infinitive in British and American English in the twentieth century. Spoken data from ten ICE corpora are used to verify this development. L1 varieties are shown to be subject to a development practically indistinguishable from British/American English. British-input L2 varieties and a variety with an English-lexifier Creole substrate (Jamaica) show an internally heterogeneous picture, with the unifying factor being that they are all less advanced in the development than the L1 varieties. Philippine English, finally, is intermediate between British-input L2 varieties and most L1 varieties, probably reflecting its historical American source. Keywords: cleft-sentence construction; language change; Late Modern English; ESL; ENL

The study investigates language use and language attitudes among Nigerian immigrants in Germany, thus contributing to the study of World Englishes in mobility and migration. The data comprises ca. five hours of recorded interviews and is analysed both for the linguistic features it displays and the language attitudes expressed by interviewees. In the German environment, Nigerian Standard English has to be adapted to the needs of lingua‐franca interaction, which leads to intensive borrowing and other contact influences from German. In its conclusion, the study takes issue with prevailing policies in Germany, which promote rapid acquisition of German and look on lingua‐franca English as an obstacle in the way of achieving this goal. It argues that for a transitional period lingua‐franca interaction should be seen as taking place within a multilingual repertoire that minimally requires English and German, but – depending on domain and context – may also include further components, such as Nigerian Pidgin.