Skip to main navigation menu Skip to main content Skip to site footer

Articles

Vol. 1 No. 1: June, 2013

Corpus-Approaches to the New English Web: Post-Colonial Diasporic Forums in West Africa and the Caribbean

  • Christian Mair
Submitted
February 25, 2016
Published
2016-02-25

Abstract

The present contribution reports on research carried out since November 2011 in the framework of the project
'Cyber-Creole' funded by Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG MA 1652/9). The Cyber-Creole project is
complemented by 'RomWeb' (DFG PF 699/4), which is headed by Stefan Pfänder of the Department of Romance
Languages and Literatures at the University of Freiburg, Germany. The two projects both use data downloaded from
web-based forums, employ identical strategies of data collection and mark-up and have developed a shared search
and analysis interface, NCAT (= Net Corpora Administration Tool). The two projects also share a similar general
theoretical orientation, being motivated by an interest in how the new media impact on the spread of standard and
non-standard varieties of European ex-colonial languages in conditions of economic, political, cultural and media
globalisation. In this regard, their work is intended to make a substantial contribution to the emerging research
paradigm of the sociolinguistics of globalisation (Blommaert 2010, Coupland, ed. 2010, Mair 2013, Mair and
Pfänder (forthcoming)). The present brief survey will introduce the theoretical stance the "English" branch of the
project takes in the context of contemporary World Englishes research (section 1). Building on this, I will introduce
the analytical tool-kit which we have developed to study computer-mediated communication (CMC) in the diasporas
at the centre of our attention (section 2) and describe the sociolinguistic profile of the "Cyber -Jamaican" and "CyberNigerian" developed by two such groups (sections 3 and 4). The conclusion (section 5) will summarise the most
important insights and outline perspectives for further work.