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5 - Present-Day Standard English

Whose Language Was It Anyway?

from Part I - Pooling Perspectives

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  17 December 2020

By
Terttu Nevalainen
Edited by
Anna Mauranen  and
Svetlana Vetchinnikova
Anna Mauranen
Affiliation:
University of Helsinki
Svetlana Vetchinnikova
Affiliation:
University of Helsinki
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Summary

The Standard English third-person singular -s of present-tense verbs may not be of much consequence in international communication today, but its history reveals interesting parallels with processes that are typical of ELF. Drawing on research on historical corpora and databases, this chapter draws attention to the fact that Standard English is an accumulation of features that were adopted by speakers of English in different periods and from a variety of origins – just as in English used in international communication today, but by a smaller speaker population and from a more limited feature pool. The case study traces the spread of verbal -s back to Late Middle and Early Modern English, and reconstructs the processes that it underwent regionally and socially, and from speech to writing. The alternative expressions that could have been selected instead include the suffixless variant, commonly found in ELF today.

Keywords

dialect contactELFhistorical sociolinguisticslanguage changeNorthern Subject RuleStandard Englishvariationverbal -sCorpus of Early English Correspondence
Type
Chapter
Information
Language Change
The Impact of English as a Lingua Franca
 , pp. 123 - 151
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2020

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