Gibson Ferguson Language Planning and Education Edinburgh ...

New Englishes and teaching models 157
(e.g. letters of application), and the use – particularly by creative writers (e.g. Raja
Rao, Wole Soyinka, Chinua Achebe) – of rhetorical strategies different from those
found in metropolitan varieties, involving, for example, metaphors translated from
local languages, local interactional devices in written dialogue and novel collocations
(see Kachru 1995).
6.3 THE GENESIS OF NEW ENGLISHES
Moving on from this brief overview of features, we need to consider briefly the
developmental, psycholinguistic and socio-cultural processes that have contributed
to the emergence of New Englishes, not just because these are interesting in
themselves but because they have a bearing on one’s stance towards the features
mentioned above: are they acceptable deviations from British English or just errors,
the product of imperfect learning?
The main issue that arises is the need to decide when an observed feature of
language use is indeed an innovation and when it is simply an error. An innovation
is seen as an acceptable variant, while an error is simply a mistake or uneducated
usage. (Bamgbose 1998: 2)
Surprisingly perhaps, given the starkness of this contrast between innovation and
error, there is a fair measure of agreement regarding the fundamental sources or
causes of divergence from metropolitan varieties. Thus, recognising that New
Englishes are usually acquired as second languages in complex multilingual
environments, both sides in the debate acknowledge the role of transfer from natively
spoken local languages (the substrate as it is sometimes called), of universal learning
strategies of simplification and complexification and of the superstrate (the variety
of English to which acquirers are exposed), 4 even while disagreeing on the relative
weight of the contribution of these influences. They tend to agree, moreover, that
differences in lexis are substantially attributable to the transplantation of English to
new cultural surroundings, where speakers have found it necessary to elaborate
vocabulary to refer to the artefacts, situations and institutions of the new setting.
Substrate influence, one might add, is particularly evident in pronunciation,
where sounds and stress patterns of the first language tend to be transferred to
English, though it also shows up in the grammatical and morphological features of
the local English. Singapore Colloquial English (SCE), for example, shows definite
substrate influence from Malay and Chinese (e.g. in article usage).
Evidence, meanwhile, for the influence of universal learning processes (e.g.
simplification and regularisation) derives from the similarities observed between
New Englishes in different parts of the world (e.g. Nigeria, India, Singapore) with
respect to deviations from British English. The tendency of these to cluster in
morpho-syntactic areas known to be problematic to second language acquirers –
preposition use, mass/count nouns, word order in interrogatives, elements of verb
morphology – is an indication, some commentators argue, that they may be the