Biljana Čubrović (University of Belgrade, Serbia)
Abstract
The position of English as a global language and the lingua franca of our time has also influenced the emergence of different L2 Englishes around the world, each somewhat specific in its own right. More recently, academic publishers seem to have embraced materials that provide detailed phonetic descriptions of such new varieties (cf. Hansen Edwards, 2023). These varieties, typically thought of as belonging to Kachru's so-called “expanding circle,” are now getting a life of their own, often phonetically diverging from L1 Englishes. Cruttenden (2014) conveniently coined the term “amalgam English” for different varieties of L2 Englishes and suggested allowing wider tolerance towards their pronunciation features as long as the contrasts that carry a high functional load have been maintained. The phonetic characteristics of L2 Englishes are typically drawn from the features of the local language in question but are also influenced by factors such as the variety/varieties of English speakers are exposed to and their attitude toward them.
In this talk I explore the development of one such variety of L2 English, investigating the speech characteristics of a group of Serbian L1 speakers, all English majors at a state university in central Serbia, who have not spent a significant amount of time in an L1 English-speaking country. Their speech samples were analyzed auditorily and compared to the self-reported variety of English that the participants thought they spoke.
ESBB Featured Session: Research Paper (In person; 25 minutes)
Pronunciation
General Interest
About the Presenter
Biljana Čubrović is a professor of English linguistics in the Department of English, Faculty of Philology, at the University of Belgrade in Serbia, where she teaches courses in English phonetics and research methods in linguistics. She was a visiting scholar at the postdoctoral level in the Department of Linguistics at Cornell University, Ithaca, New York, in 2008-2009 and 2013-2015. She has published extensively, including authoring and co-authoring several books on English phonetics, and founded the Laboratory for Phonetic Research at the Faculty of Philology in Belgrade in 2017. She is president of the publishing council at the Faculty of Philology. She is a founding member of English Scholars Beyond Borders.
References
Cruttenden, A. (2014). Gimson’s pronunciation of English (8th ed.). Routledge.
Hansen Edwards, J. G. (2023). The sounds of English around the world: An introduction to phonetics and phonology. Cambridge University Press.
Kachru, B. (1985). Standards, codification and sociolinguistic realism: English language in the outer circle. In R. Quirk and H. Widowson (Eds.), English in the world: Teaching and learning the language and literatures (pp. 11-36). Cambridge University Press.
