Investigating Diachronic Variation and Change in New Varieties of English

The Study of Indian English From a Language-Contact Perspective

The issue of contact instantiating processes of pidginization and creolization can be differentiated according to varieties that arise through contact with languages coming outside the area, especially through colonialism and varieties that arise through internal contact among languages already indigenous to the area (Schiffman 2010, p.741). From this perspective, the South-Asian region can be considered a paradigm example of the phenomenon known as “convergence area” (Weinreich 1958) referred to phenomena specifically occurring in language contact situations that lead to changes in all areas of grammar.

Some decades after Weinreich’s descriptive study, Charles Ferguson (1992) published a comprehensive essay on some features of “language use” that make South Asia an interesting subject of study as “sociolinguistic area”. His attention to “shared patterns of use” and not only of shared grammatical structures was an important step towards the understanding of general processes of language change in contact situations. Ferguson’s particular perspective, in fact, “looks for the relationship between diachronic language change and language development, phonology and syntax, social conventionalization and cognitive processing, and language universals and individual differences” (Huebner 1996, p.12). Consequently, in studies concerning the development of new varieties, a crucial issue is the extent to which universals of language (Pinker 2003, p.23) and language contact exert their influence on shaping those language systems. Recent research has tested current hypotheses on the interrelationship between language universals and language variation and given rise to new challenging theories on contact varieties. Namely, the notion of “vernacular universals” (Chambers 2004) limits the supposed tendency towards the absolute creativity of these varieties relying on the identification of universally shared features across varieties of English around the world.