Grammatical variation in two Asian minority groups in Britain

Christine Raschka

Fri. 2:00-4:05 C

A considerable amount of research has been carried out in recent years in Europe and particularly in Britain on the linguistic situation of Asian minorities in industrialised countries (see Klein and Dittmar 1979; the Linguistic Minorities Project 1985; Li 1994; and Milroy and Muysken 1995 amongst others for more detail).

The present paper reports selective results of a project which investigates grammatical patterns of English language use of ten women from two ethnic minority groups (Punjabi and Chinese) with language abilities ranging from a low level of ability to a higher standard. A substantial corpus of naturally occurring conversational data collected in the women's homes is analysed by means of a modified Language Assessment Remediation and Screening Procedure (LARSP) profile (based on the Quirk grammar, Crystal et al 1989), providing a qualitative and quantitative description of the English language ability of each woman. Variability of English language ability both within and across the two groups is tentatively linked to social factors specific to the individual and the groups.

Preliminary analysis suggests that the major linguistic dimensions of variation are the following: ratio of minor to major clause utterance tokens; grammatical morphology; a range of simple versus a range of complex utterance structures. The relationship of these variable patterns to the informal social network structures of both groups and individuals is considered.

References

Crystal, D.; Fletcher, P. and Garman, M. (1989) The Grammatical Analysis of Language Disability (2nd Ed.). London: Cole and Whurr.

Klein, W. and Dittmar, N. (1979) Developing Grammars. Heidelberg: Springer Verlag

Li, W. (1994) Three Gererations, two Languages, one Familiy: Language Choice and Language Shift in a Chinese Community in Britain. Clevedon: Multilingual Matters.

Linguistic Minorities Project (1985) The other languages of England. London: Routledge

Milroy, L. and Muysken, P. (eds.) (1995) One Speaker, two Languages: Cross Disciplinary Perspectives on Bilingualism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Quirk, R.; Greenbaum, S.; Leech, G. and Svartvik, J. (1985) A Comprehensive Grammar of the English Language. London, N.Y.: Longman.