Postcolonial English varieties in the Arab World: a preliminary study

Abstract

The present exploratory study seeks to answer the question of whether English used in the Arab World exhibits distinctive lexico-grammatical features, and hence can be classified as a postcolonial variety of English. The study uses Schneider’s Dynamic Model as its theoretical framework and seeks to examine where such variety, if it exists, might fall on the model’s phases (i.e. foundation, exonormative stabilization, nativization, endonormative stabilization, and differentiation). A corpus of the English used in a selected newspaper was compiled and the British newspaper subcorpus of the Longman Spoken and Written English Corpus was used for comparison purposes. The analysis implemented bottom-up and top-down approaches as well as a mix of quantitative and qualitative interpretations. Findings show that there are some distinctive lexico-grammatical features in the selected presumed variety of English. Based on the classification criteria of the Dynamic Model, it appears to be at the beginning of the nativization phase.

Keywords:

• World Englishes
• English varieties
• postcolonial English
• Arab World
• newspapers