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The role of the descriptor ‘broken English’ in ideologies about nonnative speech

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  04 October 2017

Stephanie Lindemann  and
Katherine Moran
Stephanie Lindemann*
Affiliation:
Georgia State University, USA
Katherine Moran
Affiliation:
Georgia State University, USA
*
Address for correspondence: Stephanie Lindemann, Department of Applied Linguistics and ESL, Georgia State University, P.O. Box 4099, Atlanta, GA 30302-4099, USAlindemann@gsu.edu
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Abstract

This study investigates how the descriptor ‘broken English’ is used to construct speakers as nonnative within standard language ideology. In-depth analysis of examples found through WebCorp, used to search US websites, and the Corpus of Contemporary American English found that the term was largely used to refer to comprehensible English identified as nonnative. Users of such English were constructed as Other, usually highly negatively. The rarer cases of more positive descriptions referred to encounters outside English-speaking countries, consistent with monolingualist ideology, and when used for a more distantly superior person, made them more attractive through greater apparent accessibility. Four mechanisms are discussed by which use of the term naturalizes ideologies. Crucially, its ambiguity promotes slippage between ‘neutral’ and negative uses, allowing any English identified as nonnative to be characterized as ‘broken’, slipping into ‘not English’, with such descriptions treated as an acceptable way to identify nonnative speakers as public menace. (Standard language ideology, ideology of nativeness, monolingualist ideology, Othering, corpus-informed research)*

Type
Articles
Information
Language in Society , Volume 46 , Issue 5 , November 2017 , pp. 649 - 669
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Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2017 

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Footnotes

*

The authors wish to thank Diane Belcher, Eliana Hirano, and Paula Golombek and others at the University of Florida for their helpful comments and discussion on earlier presentations of this material, and Matthew Nelson, Stephen Skalicky, two anonymous reviewers, and editor Jenny Cheshire for their helpful feedback on earlier versions of the manuscript. Remaining flaws are of course our own.

References

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