Contacts and variability in international Englishes : Compiling and using the Corpus of English in Finland

• The past few decades have witnessed a substantial spread of English as the language of international communication. One of the consequences of this growth of English world-wide is that there is a need to develop new corpora that make it possible to describe these expanded uses of English. To illustrate the expansion of English, this article first presents an overview of the linguistic situation of present-day Finland, a country in which English has for long been used as a foreign language with no institutional status. The various uses of English in Finland are illustrated drawing from the results of the recent large-scale survey of English in Finland, carried out at the Research Unit for Variation, Contacts and Change in English (VARIENG). These survey results provide useful background information for an on-going corpus compilation process of the Corpus of English in Finland. The article then presents the results of three case studies that explore morphological and grammatical variability in this material.

Ämnesord

HUMANIORA  -- Språk och litteratur -- Studier av enskilda språk (hsv//swe)

HUMANITIES  -- Languages and Literature -- Specific Languages (hsv//eng)

Nyckelord

International English

ongoing change

Engelska med språkvetenskaplig inriktning

English

Publikations- och innehållstyp

ref (ämneskategori)

art (ämneskategori)