Lose one's life and lose one's job with singular they: two constructions, two regional varieties, many practical aspects of working with mega-corpora

The paper compares the usage of singular they with two morphologically similar constructions in British and American English. The constructions in question are lose one’s life and lose one’s job. The results obtained suggest that singular they, at least used with the two constructions in focus of this work, seems to be more widely used in the American variety of English than in the British variety. An additional aim of this work is to present and discuss some practical aspects of working with mega-corpora. The work shows how and where quantitative language studies need to be accompanied by manual and qualitative investigations. The corpora used in this work are the British National Corpus (BNC) and the Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA).

East Anglian English in the English Dialects App

East Anglian English was the first British variety of English to be subject to dialectological scrutiny using sociolinguistic techniques (Trudgill, 1974, and his subsequent work) and since then has been subject to only sporadic investigation (e.g. Britain, 1991, 2014a, 2014b, 2015; Kingston, 2000; Straw, 2006; Amos, 2011; Potter, 2012, 2018; Butcher, 2015). Recent research has suggested that, in those few locations that have been investigated, East Anglian English is gradually losing some of its traditional dialect features, in favour of forms from the South East more generally. Kingston (2000), Britain (2014a) and Potter (2018) all found, for example, a rather steep decline in the use of East Anglia's traditional third-person present-tense zero. Furthermore, we are aware of the arrival into East Anglia of linguistic innovations from the South East of England, such as TH fronting (Trudgill, 1988; Britain, 2005; Potter, 2012) and /l/ vocalisation (Johnson & Britain, 2007; Potter, 2014), but we only know about their success in a few parts of the region – Norwich, East Suffolk and the Fens. Since Trudgill's investigations across East Anglia in the 1970s, however (e.g. Trudgill & Foxcroft, 1978), and despite a few multilocality studies (Britain, 1991, 2014a; Potter, 2018) no research has been able to provide a picture of the state of the traditional dialect across the whole region. We have therefore only a patchy understanding of the extent to which traditional dialect obsolescence, dialect levelling and innovation diffusion have impacted the dialect landscape of this region as a whole.

Eurosceptycyzm znad Wełtawy. Inspiracja brytyjska czy oryginalny wariant czeskich konserwatystów?

The aim of this paper is to reveal the connections between the British version of Euroskepticism (as one variety of this political and intellectual phenomenon) and its Czech variant, personified by the present President of the Czech Republic – Vaclav Klaus. The paper discusses the fundamental elements of the Euroskeptical outlook that are sometimes presented to public opinion in EU states as ‘Eurorealism.’ The British variety is presented alongside the most important elements of the same concept in France and Denmark. Although Czech Europskepticism refers to numerous significant structural elements of its British predecessor, it has a number of original features. Among others, they result from the geopolitical conditions of Central Europe. The author analyzes the statements of the present Czech president (who once described himself as a Thatcherist) to show his essential influence on the shape of Euroskeptical attitudes on the Vltava. The author also presents the most important foreign policy documents of the former political circles of Vaclav Klaus, i.e. the Civic Democratic Party (ODS), with their Europskeptical overtones. The paper concludes with the author’s observations concerning the similarities and discrepancies between British and Czech attitudes.

Accents of English at Czech Schools: Students’ Attitudes and Recognition Skills

The study investigates the attitudes of 254 Czech students towards English as the main language taught at secondary schools. The questionnaire enquired about their perspectives on learning English in general, British and American cultures and accents of English. Such preferences may have implications for pronunciation model selection in TEFL. In addition, the participants evaluated 12 words pronounced in British or American English for pleasantness, and also assigned them to one of the varieties. Despite the predominance of American culture and despite equal distribution of cultural preferences and equal aesthetic evaluation of the accents, the British variety was marked as more prestigious and was also identified more successfully. Interestingly, the findings differed between students from the capital city and those from regional schools.

Raising High School English Teachers’ awareness of EIL

The present study is a three-stage action research that aims at raising EFL teachers’ awareness of English as an International Language (EIL) and World Englishes (WE) within a critical perspective of inquiry. Through a taught module on English and its varieties, a survey, a reflection paper, and a semi-structured interview were used to collect the data. The results of the study showed that there was a clear change of conception, at the theoretical level, in teachers’ papers. However, WE was regarded as future possibility for action. On the one hand, all of the participants said the module changed their conception of other varieties of English different from British and American ones. They all went from identifying themselves with either American or British variety, a celebratory perspective, to acknowledging and accepting other English varieties, a critical perspective of English as an international language (EIL).

Informal orthographies, informal ideologies spelling and code switching in British Creole

This paper is concemed with the written representation of British Creole (a local British variety of Jamaican Creole) which has no standard orthography. Original writing is published from time to time (and we can assume that much unpublished writing goes on as well) using modified Standard English orthographies made up by the original writers. The paper examines what writers actually do when they write Creole and links this to an implicit ideology of "subversion" of the Standard Orthography rather than subservience to it. Some proposals are made up for moving toward a norm for spelling British Creole.

Teddy Brown and the Art of Performing for the British Variety Stage

British variety theatre has been largely ignored by theatre historians, in spite of its huge popularity in the early twentieth century. Here, Oliver Double examines variety through its exemplification in the work of one performer, Teddy Brown, a virtuoso xylophone player whose career coincided with the heyday of the variety stage between and just after the two world wars. The key historical and stylistic aspects of the form typified by Brown's success included the development of a stage persona, novelty, skill, participation, a distinctive musical style, and the ability to exploit the complex relationship between variety and the other types of popular entertainment of the time, notably cinema, revue, and radio. Former comedian Oliver Double is a Senior Lecturer in Drama at the University of Kent, and is the author of Stand-Up! On Being a Comedian (Methuen, 1997) and Getting the Joke: the Inner Workings of Stand-Up Comedy (Methuen, 2005). His stand-up comedy DVD Saint Pancreas is available from the University of Kent website.