English in Kenya or Kenyan English? (Crossroads and Interfaces: Studies in Linguistics and Literature)

The book aims to recognize or reject English in Kenya as a new, emancipated variety of English developing in a multilingual environment of permanent language contact. It discusses in detail the sociolinguistic situation in contemporary Kenya based on Labov’s extra-linguistic parameters and the results of a customized survey carried out by the author in Kenya. Furthermore, it identifies and describes characteristic stylistic, lexical, morphological and syntactic features of English in Kenya on the basis of the International Corpus of English (ICE). The theoretical framework employs Schneider’s Dynamic Model of Postcolonial Englishes and an effort is made to put the amount of variation found in the ICE into a wider context of other varieties of English around the world. Is Kenyan English a new postcolonial variety of English developing in a multilingual environment of permanent language contact? Analysis of lexical, morphological and syntactic features in the International Corpus of English for East Africa (ICE-EA) is accompanied by a sociolinguistic perspective and summarized employing Schneider’s Dynamic Model.