Appendix 1 Checklist of nonstandard features The variation found in varieties of English can be documented for different lin- guistic levels. Below, an attempt is made to indicate what the chief features of phonology, morphology and syntax are which are more or less removed from contemporary conceptions of standard English in major anglophone countries. Vocabulary is only dealt with briefly (see section 4) as the variation here is not amatter of structural differences. In a way lexical variation represents a rel- atively simple case: a word in an anglophone variety is either a dialect sur- vival, an indigenous loanword or an independent development, if it has not been inherited through historical continuity with mainstream English. There may be some cases of disagreement, an instance being shanty which could stem from the Canadian French for ‘log cabin’ or be possibly connected with the Irish for ‘old house’. However, the levels of sounds and grammar provide many contentious issues because the sources of their features are not so easily iden- tified. These levels constitute subsystems in language – closed classes – which speakers are not usually aware of and where for virtually every parallel between an extraterritorial variety and a British dialect there is an equally significant difference. Such situations are tantalising for the linguist but also represent a challenge to present a convincing case either for or against dialect influence. Not all the items listed below are necessarily instances of dialect retention or at least may have other possible origins as contact features or independent developments. . Any consideration of parallels between feat- ures in different dialects must consider the distinction between the presence of agrammatical category in a dialect and the exponence, the actual realisation, of this category. Frequently analyses of dialect rely too strongly on form and differences in form can often lead to the erroneous view that there is no shared category. This applies not only to two or more dialects but also to dialects and ∗ Igratefully acknowledge the helpful comments on a draft of this appendix which Michael Montgomery and Edgar Schneider provided me with while writing it. They are obviously not to be associated with any shortcomings. 586 Checklist of nonstandard features 587 other languages with which they may have been in contact. A clear example of this is provided by habitual aspect in various anglophone varieties. That it exists as a grammatical category in varieties such as South-West British English, Irish English, African American English and various forms of English in the Caribbean is uncontested (see Hickey, this volume, chapter 12), but the realisa- tion of the habitual varies across these varieties. Furthermore, when considering the source of habitual aspect in Irish English one can note that the category exists in Irish as well, although its exponence is quite different given the mor- phology of Irish. Thus the difference in form might lead scholars to assume that a contact source for habitual aspect in Irish English is to be ruled out. Nonetheless, there is a considerable likelihood that this category was transferred by speakers during the long period of shift from Irish to English and realised using means available in the English they were exposed to, namely by employing the afunctional, unstressed do + be in declarative sentences, still present in the early modern period in Ireland. Another realisation found mainly in the north of Ireland is with inflected be, i.e. bees. The careful distinction between category and exponence allows one to conclude that habitual aspect is an areal phenomenon in the island of Ireland (Hickey 1999a), despite the variation in the north and south of the country.Although this illustration uses Irish English, the distinction between category and exponence holds true for all the varieties discussed in this volume. . The occurrence of features in a variety may be absolute or relative, i.e. vary, in some cases inherently and in others according to situation. Where the latter is the case many factors may be involved such as style, degree of informality, discourse setting, etc. For instance, the unmarked genitive of African American English is a variable feature, i.e. one can have John book or John’s book. Another case is copula deletion, again one may have Mary home or Mary’s home (Mufwene 2001: 295, 298). Many of the features described below are variable, but their statistical frequency is usually sufficient to label them as characteristic of the varieties in question. 1 Phonology 1.1 Consonants . This term refers to the occurrence of /r/insyllable codas, e.g. bore /bor/. Within the anglophone world there are certain areas in which /r/inthe codas of syllables is not pronounced (Wells 1982: 218–22). In the British context, the areas which are nonrhotic, i.e. which do not have syllable- final /r/, are the Midlands, the east and the south-east of England (Upton and Widdowson 1996: 30f.). Traditionally,the south-west, the north-west and the far north-east are rhotic areas, though the situation is often blurred by the presence of supraregional, nonrhotic speakers. 588 Appendix 1 Within the United States there are a few (recessive) nonrhotic regions, for instance in eastern New England, New York City and the Tidewater South (Fisher 2001: 75–7) as well as among African Americans. Otherwise American English shows a retroflex /r/[]insyllable-codas, a feature which may have its roots in the many Scots-Irish settlers of the eighteenth century (see the discussion in Wolfram and Schilling-Estes 1998: 92–6). In the anglophone southern hemisphere, varieties of English are nonrhotic (Wells 1982: 603, 606, 616), though there may be minor exceptions to this in southern New Zealand and in Afrikaans English. The nonrhotic character of this entire area is due to the fact that the accents of early to mid nineteenth-century settlers from the south-east of England prevailed. ⁄r⁄. The /r/ sound may be realised in a number of ways and there may be a difference between the word-final and preconsonantal posi- tions. For those varieties without syllable-final /r/ there may be a linking /r/ when a vowel follows the position where /r/ was present formerly, e.g. bear out [bεr aut]. This is a sandhi phenomenon where the original /r/ became ambi- syllabic with the following vowel-initial syllable and so was not lost. Intrusive /r/ refers to situations in which it is etymologically unjustified, e.g. draw out [drɔr aut]. Loss of /r/may be sensitive to stress (only lost in unstressed sylla- bles, for instance). Rhotacised shwa across a syllable boundary is typical of forms of American English but not of other rhotic varieties such as Irish or Scottish English, e.g. [əmkə] America instead of [əmεɹkə](Wells 1982: 213–18). -. This term (used by Ihalainen 1994: 216) refers to an /r/ which is ‘induced by a final shwa’. It goes back at least to the eighteenth century and was remarked on by prescriptive writers like Sheridan (1781) and Walker (1791). It is found in words like fellow [fεl] and window [wnd], e.g. in Southern/South-Western English (Upton and Widdowson 1996: 28f.), where the final long vowel was reduced to /ə/ and then rhotacised. Nonrhotic varieties may show hyper-rhoticity even where there is no special reduction of the final syllable, e.g. in pronunciations like China [tʃainəɹ](Trudgill 1986: 74). There may also be an overgeneralisation in words like khaki [kɑrki], lager [lɑr ər] (with rhotic varieties), or an intrusive /r/inwords like wash, because (in the Midland region of the United States, Pederson 2001: 272). ⁄l ⁄. In colloquial varieties of South- Eastern British English the vocalisation of syllable-final /l/isvery common. Here one is dealing with a shift of a velarised [ ]toahigh back vowel [υ]in colloquial speech, e.g. [m k] > [mυk](Wells 1982: 258f.). The vocalisation of /l/ shows a progression through a high back vowel to zero and a similar vocalisation, this time of a palatal /lj/, occurred historically via /j/informs of Romance, e.g. French. Such vocalisation is a different process from the deletion of /l/informs of American English where it may be sensitive to the position in aword, only occurring before labials (Wolfram and Schilling-Estes 1998: 72f.). Checklist of nonstandard features 589 However, in some of these cases the deletion of /l/isdue to the simplification of word-final consonant clusters (Mufwene 2001: 296) and not to the progression from a velarised lateral to a vowel. ⁄l⁄. There is a long history in English of the diphthongisation of low and back vowels before a velarised /l/. The examples where the /l/ was followed by a velar stop became part of the standard, e.g. talk, walk, etc. (Dobson 1968: 533, Ekwall 1975: 63f.). Other instances, such as as caull ‘call’, gowlde ‘gold’, did not survive in the standard. However, in some varieties this diphthongisation did survive, e.g. in Irish English and in Scotland (McClure 1994: 48). There may then be a lexical split between a form of a word with a standard and a local pronunciation, e.g. bold versus baul’ [baul] ‘with sneaking admiration’ (Irish English, Hickey in press). ⁄t⁄. This may be sensitive to the position in a word, i.e. it may occur initially, medially, finally (or in a combination of these positions) or it may be confined to a preconsonantal position. There may also be differences in what segments can be replaced by [ʔ], e.g. only /t/–bottle [bɒʔl ]–oralso /p/ and /k/. The stop affected may also be deleted or preglottalisation may take place with the stop retained. Glottalisation is common in vernacular forms of southern English (Wells 1982: 260f.), for instance, and is also prevalent in Scotland (Milroy and Milroy 1999: 85) and Northern Ireland.