The next Linguistics Circle talk will be held on Friday 9 November at 12:00 noon in Hall D1, Gateway Building (GW HD1).
The talk, by Prof. Manfred Krug, University of Bamberg, is entitled 'Language change in Maltese English and patterns of linguistic globalisation'.
The talk, by Prof. Manfred Krug, University of Bamberg, is entitled 'Language change in Maltese English and patterns of linguistic globalisation'.
This paper draws primarily on data from Maltese English and, to a lesser extent, Puerto Rican English, British English and American mainland English. The data stem from questionnaire studies; the focus is on the lexicon.
In a first step, we will investigate linguistic choices made by different age groups in Malta, thereby identifying language change in progress. More specifically (though not unexpectedly), it will be seen that younger speakers in Malta generally portray a more globalized linguistic behaviour than older speakers. More surprisingly perhaps (given a very short diachronic time span), the data also suggest real-time changes, as globalization tendencies are more pronounced in recently elicited data from 2014 than in the first questionnaire studies from 2008 and 2009. Finally, the changes observed for Maltese English will be integrated into larger patterns of linguistic globalization.
