Sarah Buschfeld

English in Cyprus or Cyprus English: An empirical investigation of variety status

This volume provides the first-ever comprehensive analysis of a potential variety of English, spoken in the Greek part of the Mediterranean island of Cyprus. Despite the fact that Cyprus was a British colony from 1878 to 1960, the status of the English language spoken there has not yet been discussed systematically within the framework of World Englishes. To determine whether English in Cyprus has second-language variety status or should rather be considered as learner English, the monograph investigates its historical, sociopolitical and sociolinguistic background and, drawing on a corpus of spoken data, offers a synchronic analysis of linguistic features. The results suggest to rethink some of the well-established taxonomies of World Englishes research, especially those that strictly differentiate between second-language varieties and learner Englishes. This renders the book relevant not only to scholars working in the field of World Englishes but also to second language acquisition researchers.

From colonial dynamism to current transnationalism: A unified view on postcolonial and non-postcolonial Englishes

The ever-increasing dynamism of the diffusion of English calls for an integrated approach to postcolonial and non-postcolonial Englishes and to new contexts such as transnational cyberspace, new media, or “grassroots” usage. We focus on major theoretical approaches to modelling World Englishes in the 21st century by briefly defining, discussing, and comparing older and more recent approaches to the theorizing of World Englishes, their scope and their mutual relationships, notably the “Dynamic Model”, “Transnational Attraction”, and the “Extra- and Intra-territorial Forces Model”. We discuss these approaches in relation to some examples and applications from especially post-postcolonial nations and contexts, including South-East Asia, Namibia and Germany, Cyprus and Greece, Bosnia-Herzegovina, social media (with examples from Facebook), fanfiction writing, and multiplayer online games.