Professor Mair | Projects

Current Projects

West African English on the Move

 New Forms of English as a Lingua Franca (ELF) in Germany

Welcome to the homepage of WAfrE on the Move, a research project that has been funded since 1 October 2019 by Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG, grant #MA 1652/12-1). The point of our research is that postcolonial Englishes from West Africa – for example Nigerian English, Cameroonian English, Gambian English and Ghanaian English – will not be studied in their home territories, nor even in displaced but majority Anglophone diasporic settings such as the UK, the US or Canada, but in Germany, where West African immigrants use English as a lingua franca alongside German, the dominant language in the country. The focus of our research is on language and linguistics, the primary goals being:

• to compile a rich and up-to-date database for the study of new uses of English as a Lingua Franca (ELF) in a German-speaking context;
• to use the data to study the linguistic properties of immigrants’ English:
• to document the extent and communicative/social function of English-German language mixing;
• to obtain ethnographic information on speakers’ communication strategies, language attitudes and ideologies;
• to redress a bias in the study of ELF in Germany, which has so far mainly focused on elite social domains such as English Medium Instruction (EMI) in higher education and ELF in business communication.

At the core of our database are interviews with individuals and focus groups in which we discuss research participants’ language biographies, focusing both on the time spent in their African countries of origin and, subsequently, in transit and in Germany. We are aware that the value of the interviews is not restricted to linguistics. As our interviewees frequently share information about aspects of their experience other than language and communication, our data qualify as first-rate oral history material about a recent and very dynamic episode in the history of immigration to Germany. A first statistical orientation about current trends is provided by census data, in particular the Ausländerzentralregister (central register of foreign residents). It gives the following figures for the years 2011 and 2018 for the four West African countries accounting for most of the immigration from this region:

Figure 1: Foreign nationals from four West African countries in Germany – 2011 to 2019

Note that these figures considerably under-report the size of the relevant communities. For example, they do not cover illegal immigrants and all those first- and second-generation immigrants who have German citizenship. What is obvious, though, are the steep increases for all four countries during the period of observation.

In due course, we intend to make portions of our data available to researchers from other disciplines with an interest in migration, such as history, sociology, and ethnography. In addition, we are keen to enter into dialogue with members of the general public who are interested in issues of language and integration, with teachers of Deutsch als Fremdsprache, with institutions or volunteers working with migrants, and – most importantly, of course – with members of the African community in Germany. If interested, please get in touch with us via the contact form.

Team

	Samson Ajagbe holds a PhD in Sociology from the University of Freiburg, Germany. He has combined his current research associate position in this project on West African Englishes with teaching a course on “Social and Educational Works with Refugees” at the Katholische Hochschule Freiburg. These commitments, which have sparked his interest in migration and language study, inspired his current research on the sociology of language and the globalization of African languages.
	Uyi Edegbe (post-doc researcher) has a PhD in Sociology from the institute of Sociology, University of Freiburg. His research focuses on transnational migration, remittances and sustainable development. The current project builds on his past research on migration, transnational migrants and their contributions to social development of their home countries.
	Bridget Fonkeu (post-doc researcher) who is a member of the team of investigators is a native speaker of West African Pidgin. She has been a teaching and research assistant of English linguistics at the university of Bochum for four years and at the university of Dortmund for three years. This research is in line with her previous investigations on West African Englishes in the German diaspora.
	Christian Mair (principal investigator) has been a professor of English linguistics at the University of Freiburg since 1990, his research focuses being corpus linguistics and World Englishes. The current project builds on his previous research on West African Englishes, pidgins and creoles as used on the internet. He’s glad to face the challenges of working with real speakers for a change.
	Julia Müller (doctoral researcher)
	Rafaela Tosin (research assistant) is a M.A. student of English linguistics at the University of Freiburg. They have a degree is social sciences and in English. Their interests include sociolinguistics, sociophonetics, linguistic antropology and computational linguistics.
	Isolde Bonnet (doctoral researcher)

Associates and consultants:

Axel Bohmann is assistant professor for English linguistics at the University of Freiburg. His research interests include language and globalization, sociolinguistics, and corpus linguistics, which he approaches through a combination of statistical and discourse-analytical methods. His current Habilitation research focuses on language among asylum seekers in Southwestern Germany and is thus closely related to the present project.

Miriam Neuhausen (research assistant), a Ph.D. student in English linguistics, normally works on a secluded Pennsylvania German-speaking community in Ontario, Canada. She is primarily interested in how language is used in lesser-studied communities that are not mainstream and not monolingual and how speakers in these communities use language to express different identities.

Our local partners in Freiburg:

• Africa Centre for Transregional Studies (ACT)/Arnold Bergstraesser Institut
• FREINEM (Freiburger Netzwerk für Migrations- und Integrationsforschung)

Sample Data

Presentations and Publications

Ajagbe, Samsondeen (2023). Afro-diasporan racial discourse in Germany. Discourse & Society, 0(0). https://doi.org/10.1177/09579265231179670

Ajagbe, Samsondeen (2022). “Knowledge Production and the Linguistic Market Place: the Case of Nigeria.” In Marie-Joseé Lavallée, ed.  In The End of Western Hegemonies?. Wilmington, Delaware: Vernon Press.

Ajagbe, Samsondeen, Fonkeu, Bridget, & Edegbe, Uyi (2022). West African Pidgin as a tool for socio-economic development. Language Problems and Language Planning, 46(1), 1-25. https://doi.org/10.1075/lplp.21030.aja

Mair, Christian (2020). "English in the German-speaking world: an inevitable presence." In Raymond Hickey, ed. English in the German-speaking world. Cambridge: CUP, 2020. 13-30.

Mair, Christian (2020). Nigerian English in Germany. World Englishes.

Mair, Christian (2018). "Stabilising domains of English-language use in Germany: Global English in a non-colonial languagescape." In Sandra Deshors, ed. Modeling World Englishes: Assessing the interplay of emancipation and globalization of ESL varieties. Amsterdam: Benjamins, 2018. 45-75.

Project Archive 

ICE-Jamaica

Compilation of the Jamaican Component of The International Corpus of English

Most Jamaicans tend to think of themselves as English-speaking and therefore regard Patois, the creole language spoken in Jamaica, as some kind of English. Meanwhile, to many linguists it would seem quite plausible to consider English and Patois (the folk designation for Jamaican Creole) two distinct languages in view of the far-reaching differences in syntax and sound pattern. The chief problem for a linguistic description of Caribbean English usage today is to model the relationship between English and the various English-lexifier creoles of the region.

In compiling the "Caribbean" component of ICE it has been decided to sample only texts from Jamaica, the most populous and a culturally very influential community. The make-up of the current release of ICE-Jamaica is heavily biassed towards the written component. Not only has sampling been more difficult for the spoken material than the written. An issue of principle is clearly involved, too - namely the nature of the Creole-English continuum typical of the Caribbean. The written language of Jamaica is English; its spoken language is not simply English but a span of the continuum comprising English and the upper mesolectal range – even for the type of educated speaker envisaged as informant in the ICE guidelines.

Associated Research Projects

• Deuber, Dagmar. Style and standards in English in the Caribbean: Morphological and syntactic variation in Jamaica and Trinidad. [Habilitation]
• Rosenfelder, Ingrid. Sociophonetic variation in educated Jamaican English: An analysis of the spoken component of ICE-Jamaica. [Dissertation]
• Jantos, Susanne. Morphosyntax in Educated Jamaican English: a comparison of spoken and written usage in ICE-Jamaica. [Dissertation]
• Höhn, Nicole. Discourse markers in spoken Jamaican English: a corpus-based study. [Dissertation]

The University of the West Indies
The Jamaican Language Unit (JLU)

Background Reading: "The English Language in Jamaica"

Christian Mair & Andrea Sand

The Caribbean – understood here as the West Indian islands (or Antilles) and those portions of the Central and South American mainland which have shared a similar history as slavery-based colonial plantation economies – is one of the culturally and linguistically most heterogeneous and fragmented areas in the world. The Anglophone Caribbean, although just one part of this broader cultural area, itself presents linguistic situations of baffling complexity. The feature common to all states and territories – regardless of whether they are part of the islands (Jamaica, Trinidad & Tobago, Barbados, and many smaller ones) or the mainland (Guyana, Belize) – is that English co-exists with various English-lexicon creole languages, which are extremely vital and widely used by all strata of society in spoken and informal communication. Apart from occasional experimental or literary uses, however, they do not normally appear in writing, and standardised orthographies are confined to specialist circles such as linguists. Depending on the specific context, local English usage has been influenced to varying degrees by contact with other European languages, non-European immigrant languages such as Hindi, Bhojpuri (=Bihari) or Chinese, Creoles with a language other than English as a lexifier, and also by native American languages, many of which are now extinct.

The current situation in most communities can be described as one in which local norms of educated English usage are developing in a forcefield marked by partly conflicting tensions. British English, with an R.P. accent, has been the inherited colonial norm and continues to exercise a strong influence in official language use, in the educational system, and the more conservative segments of the media. Owing to massive emigration and the ever-present influence of U.S. business and media in the region, the influence of North American English is almost equally powerful now. Last but not least, political decolonisation and the attendant development of a new sense of cultural awareness and ethnic pride have led to a profound change in the structure, function and prestige of many of the creole languages of the region. While the structural base of the traditional rural creole "basilect" is gradually being eroded through intensive language contact with English, the resulting modified or "mesolectal" forms of the Creole have lost much of the social stigma traditionally associated with them. British English, the traditional "acrolect", by contrast, has lost some of its prestige and represents a norm more often proclaimed than actually followed.

The chief problem for a linguistic description of Caribbean English usage today is to model the relationship between English and the various English-lexifier creoles of the region. In view of the far-reaching differences in syntax and sound pattern, it would be quite plausible, for example, to consider English and "patois" (the folk designation for Jamaican Creole) two distinct languages. However, this is not the view of most Jamaicans, who tend to think of themselves as English-speaking and therefore regard patois as some kind of English. Nor are utterances mixing English and patois elements good instances of the type of code-switching observed in some truly bilingual communities such as Hispanic speakers in the United States. The majority of linguists who have studied English usage in the region therefore conceive of the complicated polyphony of more English-like and more Creole-like ways of speaking as a "continuum" which provides for gradual but far from random transitions between the two extreme linguistic poles.

Commentators agree that a shared history and cultural heritage, and strong intra-regional mobility have created a variety which can be legitimately referred to as Caribbean English. However, even in educated usage as one inspects more informal and spoken usage local peculiarities persist to a considerable extent, especially in pronunciation and the lexicon. This is why in compiling the "Caribbean" component of ICE it has been decided to sample only texts from Jamaica, the most populous and a culturally very influential community. Many results obtained from analyses of the Jamaican corpus will no doubt reflect usage in the Caribbean as a whole (an assumption which might easily be tested on the basis of further corpora from other parts of the Caribbean at some later stage). A "compound" Caribbean corpus with texts from several Caribbean countries, on the other hand, might have levelled differences in local usage, thus taking for granted a homogeneity of Caribbean language norms which ought to be proved in the description. Also, detailed comparative studies of individual sub-components (e.g. Jamaica vs. Trinidad & Tobago), while useful in some cases, were generally expected to yield inconclusive results on account of the small size of the samples.

As can be seen from the make-up of the current release of ICE-Jamaica (cf. Appendix), which is heavily biassed towards the written component, sampling has been more difficult for the spoken material than the written. In the first place, this is, of course, due to the usual practical problems of obtaining, recording, storing and transcribing spoken language, but an issue of principle is clearly involved, too - namely the nature of the Creole-English continuum briefly described above. The written language of Jamaica is English; patois is present in the form of loans, quotes, and more generally as a substrate indirectly accounting for some peculiarities of local usage. The spoken language of Jamaica, however, is English only in very formal contexts. In informal communication, it is not simply English but a span of the continuum comprising English and the upper mesolectal range - even for the type of educated speaker envisaged as informant in the ICE guidelines. (This is, obviously, one major sociolinguistic difference between Jamaica and other native-speaker communities such as Australia, Britain, or the United States, where educated speakers would not be expected to deviate much from standard English in their lexicon and grammar). Conversations such as S1A-002, in which a stranger to the community (i.e. the ICE team's German research assistant) talks with Jamaicans in an informal atmosphere, are therefore typical with regard to the structural features of Jamaican English they document, but somewhat marginal from a sociolinguistic and functional perspective (communication with foreigners being, after all, a less central task than communication among community insiders).

As regards its place in the ICE bunch of corpora, we hope that the written material assembled in ICE-Jamaica will be analysed by the usual corpus-linguistic and statistical methods, and that such investigations will reveal the structural profile of educated Jamaican English and its relations to other standards. Among the most interesting questions will be whether Jamaican English, the only variety in ICE with a Creole substrate, closely resembles natively spoken standards or whether it also shares some features with the second-language standards emerging in those former colonies in which English is an adopted official language. Given the complexities described and the relatively small amount of text assembled, we suggest that the spoken material should be investigated by qualitative methods such as the ones developed in conversation analysis and the ethnography of speaking.

Publications dealing with ICE-Jamaica:

• Mair, Christian. "Problems in the Compilation of a Corpus of Standard Caribbean English: A Pilot Study." Gerhard Leitner, ed. New Directions in English Language Corpora. Berlin: de Gruyter, 1992. 75-96.
• Mair, Christian, and Andrea Sand. "Caribbean English: Structure and Status of an Emerging Variety." Raimund Borgmeier, Herbert Grabes and Andreas Jucker, eds. Anglistentag 1997: Giessen – Proceedings. Trier: Wissenschaftlicher Verlag, 1998. 187-98.
• Sand, Andrea. Linguistic Variation in Jamaica: A Corpus-Based Study of Radio and Newspaper Usage. Tübingen: Narr, 1999.

Further reading on English in Jamaica:

• Allsopp, Richard. Dictionary of Caribbean English Usage. Oxford: OUP, 1996.
• Cassidy, Frederic G. Jamaica Talk: 300 Years of the English Language in Jamaica. London: Macmillan, 1961.
• Christie, Pauline. "Questions of Standards and Intra-Regional Differences in Caribbean Examinations." Ofelia Garcia and Ricardo Ortheguy, eds. English across Cultures – Cultures across English: A Reader in Cross-Cultural Comminication. Berlin: de Gruyter, 1989. 243-62.
• Holm, John A. "English in the Caribbean." Robert Burchfield, ed. The Cambridge History of the English Language. Vol. V.: English in Britain and Overseas. Cambridge: CUP, 1994. 328-81.
• LePage, Robert B. "Some Premises Concerning the Standardisation of Languages, with Special Reference to Caribbean Creole English." International Journal of the Sociology of Language 71 (1988): 25-36.
• Patrick, Peter L. Urban Jamaican Creole: Variation in the Mesolect. Amsterdam: Benjamins, 1999.
• Roberts, Peter. West Indians and their Language. Cambridge: CUP, 1988.
• Shields, Kathryn. "Standard English in Jamaica: A Case of Competing Models." English World-Wide 10 (1989): 41-53.

Sample Transcription of a Corpus Text (with corresponding audio files)

Markup symbols

Markup symbols

<$X>

Speaker ID

<#>

Text unit markers (~ individual sentences)

<,>

Short pause (approximately one syllable)

<,,>

Longer pause (two syllables and more)

<$A> ... <{> <[> ... </[> ...
<$B> ... <[> ... </[> </{> ...

Overlaps (two or more speakers talking simultaneously)

<quote> ... </quote>

Quotations

<mention> ... </mention>

Words or phrases discussed in the text

<indig> ... </indig>

Words, expressions or phrases from Jamaican Creole

<O> laughter </O>

Laughter and other paralinuistic utterances

<}> <-> ... </-> <=> ... </=> </}>

Repetitions, hesitations, self-corrections

<.> ... </.>

Incomplete word

<?> ... </?>

Uncertain transcription

<unclear> ... </unclear>

Incomprehensible word(s)

ICE-Jamaica – Text Categories & Codes

 International Corpus of English – Jamaica Component 

Compiled at the University of Freiburg | English Department, 79085 Freiburg, Germany
and at the University of the West Indies, Mona, Kingston 7, Jamaica

Contact: Hubert Devonish & Christian Mair

F-LOB and Frown

Part-of-speech tagging for the Freiburg updates of the LOB and Brown corpora

The Freiburg updates of the well-known LOB and Brown reference corpora of British and American English (F-LOB and "Frown" for short) have been used with profit in a large number of studies on ongoing linguistic change in present-day English, both by our Freiburg-based research team and others.

"Tagged" versions of the corpora, that is versions in which each word is followed by an automatically assigned and manually post-edited part-of-speech indicator, a "tag", (cf. example text) has greatly expanded the range of investigations which can be carried out on the basis of this valuable material. For example, rather than look for individual instances of phrasal verbs, it is possible to ask whether verb+particle combinations as a group have become more frequent, or whether there have been shifts in the relative frequency of nouns or verbs in individual genres or in the language as a whole. This project was undertaken jointly with Prof. Geoffrey Leech's team at Lancaster.

The F-LOB and Frown corpora consist of the same text categories as LOB and Brown (cf. table) – each corpus consists of 500 texts of about 2,000 words each, all of them written, edited, and published, which amounts to a total of about one million words per corpus.

ARCHER – A Representative Corpus of Historical English Registers

In its original form this corpus was compiled under the direction of Prof. Douglas Biber at the University of Northern Arizona in Flagstaff, its aim being a balanced documentation of various textual genres in British and American English since ca. 1650. The material – amounting to a total of about 1.7 million words – has been used by many scholars for a wide variety of investigations on recent linguistic change and change in discourse and genre conventions. Prof. Mair has undertaken to collaborate with the original compilers and a number of other leading academic institutions in the field of historical English on a revised and expanded version of this corpus.

Work on ARCHER is currently being coordinated at the University of Manchester (UK).

www.projects.alc.manchester.ac.uk/archer

"World Languages – Digital Languages"

Studying varieties of English around the world 
within the framework of the sociolinguistics of globalisation

This ongoing research project, which is being undertaken in close collaboration with Prof. Dr. Stefan Pfänder and his group from the Romance Department, aims to develop the study of "varieties of English around the world" (aka the "New Englishes" or "World Englishes") by integrating it into the emerging research paradigm of the sociolinguistics of globalisation.

In addition to the more traditional fully fledged and territorially based varieties dominantly used in face-to-face interaction, the study of World Englishes increasingly has to reckon with global linguistic flows of deterritorialized vernacular resources, which come to the fore, for example, in digitally mediated communication, where they are available for the fashioning of subcultural styles or ethnolinguistic repertoires. This part of the research has been funded by the German Research Foundation from 2011 to 2015 – DFG project "'Cyber-Creole:' Jamaican Creole als Kontaktvarietät unter den Bedingungen globalisierter und computergestützter Kommunikation".

The more dominant English is globally, the more heterogeneous it becomes internally. The farther the language spreads, the more it is affected by the multilingual settings in which it is being used. "Natural" links between vernaculars and their territories or primary communities of speakers are becoming weaker, as migrations and media encourage the flow of linguistic resources. On such a view, the English language, the undisputed world language of the present era, is not an amalgam of separate varieties, each with its own history and each captured by listing its phonological, morphosyntactic, and lexical properties. Rather, English is a pool of standard and nonstandard resources of varying and fuzzy regional and temporal reach.

A world which is marked by criss-crossing global currents of migration of historically unparalleled intensity and an increasingly all-encompassing global "mediasphere" (Arjun Appadurai) provides a linguistic ecology in which, at least in principle, all Englishes are everywhere. However, this does not mean that the world will therefore become a more homogeneous, Anglophone communicative space. To appreciate this, it is sufficient to look at major metropolitan centres in the English-speaking world, such as London, New York, Sydney or Toronto, which have long been or have recently developed into hot spots of urban multilingualism.

CLARIN-D – Common Language Resources and Technology Infrastructure - Deutschland

[May 2011 – April 2014]

CLARIN-D is a web- and centres-based research infrastructure for the social sciences and humanities. Funded by the German Federal Ministry for Education and Research (BMBF) for an initial period of three years, it provides the following linguistic data, tools and services, among others:

• archives, corpora and dictionaries of various languages;

• tools for the annotation of written and spoken language data, as well as videos;

• WebLicht, a service-oriented architecture for creating annotated text corpora.

Since May 2011, Prof. Mair has been the head of the CLARIN consortium's discipline-specific working group on foreign-language philologies. The working group consists of leading figures in linguistics, cultural and literary studies in the fields of English, Romance and Slavic Studies at various German universities. Working in close collaboration with the CLARIN-D service centres, the group is to give advice on research priorities, so that infrastructure development can best meet the needs of the larger research community. One of the major functions of the working group is to propose and develop so-called curation projects – data, tools or services, which are of particular interest to the research community – which will then be integrated into the CLARIN-D infrastructure and made available on the web.

www.clarin-d.net