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World Englishes

The third edition of World Englishes provides an engaging overview of the global variations
in vocabulary, grammar, phonology and pragmatics of English as it is used worldwide.
This book introduces the principles of linguistic variation and provides coverage on the
roots of English, the spread of English, variations of English as a second language and
trends for the future.
Thoroughly updated throughout in line with recent research, this third edition now
also includes:

•• 43 audio examples of speakers of native (17) and of non-native (26) English reflecting
the global variety of the language, available to download from www.routledge.
com/9781138487659;
•• descriptions of selected twenty-first-century developing varieties including Chinese
English, Russian English and Vietnamese English;
•• greater linguistic detail on second-language English in many areas;
•• improved and updated descriptions of first-language varieties;
•• a new framework for describing lexical variation;
•• full discussion throughout of English in social media.

Offering a thorough and detailed descriptive account of all the main varieties of English
across the globe, World Englishes provides a balanced discussion of political issues and the
sociolinguistic background to variation in English spoken and written, face-to-face, on
paper and online, in the twenty-first century. This book is essential reading for students
approaching this topic for the first time.

Gunnel Melchers is Professor Emerita in the Department of English at Stockholm

University.

Philip Shaw is Professor Emeritus in the Department of English at Stockholm University.

Peter Sundkvist is a Reader in the Department of English at Stockholm University.

World Englishes

Third Edition

Gunnel Melchers, Philip Shaw and

Peter Sundkvist
Third edition published 2019
by Routledge
2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon, OX14 4RN
and by Routledge
52 Vanderbilt Avenue, New York, NY 10017
Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business
© 2019 Gunnel Melchers, Philip Shaw and Peter Sundkvist
The right of Gunnel Melchers, Philip Shaw and Peter Sundkvist to be identified as
authors of this work has been asserted by them in accordance with sections 77
and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or
utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now
known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any
information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the
publishers.
Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered
trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent
to infringe.
First edition published by Hodder 2003
Second edition published by Hodder 2011
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
A catalog record has been requested for this book
ISBN: 978-1-138-48766-6 (hbk)
ISBN: 978-1-138-48765-9 (pbk)
ISBN: 978-1-351-04258-1 (ebk)
Typeset in Bembo
by Deanta Global Publishing Services, Chennai, India
Visit the eResources: www.routledge.com/9781138487659
Contents

Preface vii
Acknowledgements ix
IPA chart x

1 The roots of English 1

2 The spread of English 6

3 Variation in English 11
3.1 Linguistic diversity and diffusion 11
3.2 Types of variation in form 13
3.3 Variation in historical origin and evolution 28
3.4 Dimensions of classification 29

4 The inner circle 40

4.1 England 42
4.2 Wales/Cymru 50
4.3 Scotland 55
4.4 Ireland 65
4.5 The United States 72
4.6 Canada 84
4.7 Australia 92
4.8 New Zealand/Aotearoa 99
4.9 South Africa 107
4.10 Liberia 111
4.11 The Caribbean 112
4.12 Some ‘lesser-known’ minor varieties of English 118
vi Contents

5 The outer circle 125

5.1 Social and political issues surrounding the use of English in the outer circle 125
5.2 Some common features of the ‘New Englishes’ 128
5.3 South Asia: India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, etc. 134
5.4 Africa 142
5.5 South-east Asia 157
5.6 Others 171

6 The expanding circle 176

6.1 The Rise of English in the expanding circle 176
6.2 Domains for English 178
6.3 English in lingua-franca situations 185
6.4 The possibility of expanding-circle Englishes and some examples 190
6.5 How English might be affecting other languages 199
6.6 Implications for the choice of school variety 202

7 Beyond the circles 204

7.1 Cross-currents in attitudes to English in the world 204
7.2 What’s next? 207

Wells’ standard lexical sets 213

Glossary 214
References 223
Index 242
Preface

This book is intended for undergraduate students throughout the world, whether or
not they have English as their first language, use English as their medium of educa-
tion outside Europe or are like most of our own students and use English as a foreign
or international language. The Englishes of all three types of user are covered within
this third edition, which aims to present and describe global variation and change in
the vocabulary, grammar, phonology and pragmatics of English. We also try to set the
linguistic variation within its historical and social context. We have aimed to enrich
the presentation as much as possible with ‘language in use’ taken from fiction, popular
culture, newspapers and electronic media.
This third edition comes eight years after the second and sixteen years after the first,
and it is now one of many publications in a rich population of textbooks at various levels
and handbooks with various perspectives. Each of these textbooks and other publica-
tions aims to fill a different niche. One of our aims is to provide a descriptive knowledge
of a wide range of locally and socially marked phonetic, syntactic and lexical features.
Readers will be able to recognize these features in instances of language use they meet,
and thus understand what resources users are drawing on. Our characterizations of the
varieties are therefore balanced with recordings available online, and extracts from
online communications. These samples of language use exemplify users drawing vari-
ably on locally and socially marked features. The continuing rise of computer-mediated
social networking has increased the range of forms of English visible to outsiders and
made clear the nature of many of the form features we focus on here as resources to be
drawn on, rather than features of fixed varieties. Our second aim has been to point to
the historical context of use of English in the superdiverse modern world, basically as
a product, like all language spread, of conquest, technological change and economic
forces. To this end we give factual information about many of the countries discussed,
fearing that our readers may not be well-informed about regions far from their own.
Our third aim has been to remind our readers of the terms for linguistic description of
texts and sounds and give them practice in using these terms, to escape from the circu-
larity of popular and impressionistic language for describing varieties.
The specific phonetic, lexical and syntactic features drawn on in different locations
have not changed a great deal in 16 years, but the social trends driving change and the
spread of English have progressed and intensified. Even as English becomes more and
more an accepted lingua franca in Europe, the centre of gravity of the world has shifted
to Asia, and there too English seems to be the accepted medium of communication
between speakers of different languages. Geographical distance has been reduced as a
viii Preface

limiting factor on the spread and development of features, and at the same time pur-
ist attitudes have declined, so that a wider variety of native and especially non-native
usage is acceptable. These processes seem at present to have a dynamic that may make
the spread of English immune to the effects of populist isolationism in the traditional
anglophone countries.
This edition benefits from our own experience of use of earlier editions in teach-
ing and that of others. In relation to the second edition, we have updated Chapters 1
and 2 somewhat and simplified the discussion of lexis in Chapter 3. We have extended
Chapter 4 with more linguistic detail on ethnic varieties of US English and some updat-
ing of material on other inner-circle regions. Similarly, Chapter 5 has been brought up
to date factually, and some linguistic detail has been added. In Chapter 6, we have added
linguistic descriptions of Vietnamese and Russian English as examples of expanding-
circle varieties and extended the discussion of China English. There is a glossary of
linguistic terms in alphabetical order. There are focus questions at the beginning of
each section and review questions at the end, revised on the basis of our experience of
using the book. Suggested answers to all the review questions are provided online free
of charge at www.routledge.com/9781138487659 where there is now a wider range of
online recordings of English speakers from different backgrounds.
Gunnel Melchers
Philip Shaw
Peter Sundkvist
University of Stockholm
Acknowledgements

Gunnel and Philip welcome Peter Sundkvist to the team and express their appreciation
of his dedicated work. Peter thanks Gunnel and Philip for inviting him to contribute.We
would all like to express our gratitude to the 43 speakers of World Englishes who have
lent their voices to the recordings available at www.routledge.com/9781138487659,
and to the anonymous bloggers and chat-site contributors whom we quote throughout
the book.
We are grateful for comments and suggestions on one or more of the editions from
Beyza Björkman, David Britain, Jack Chambers, Rebecca Clift, Östen Dahl, Raphaël
Domange, Stanley Ellis, Gregory Garretson, Elizabeth Gordon, Man Gao, Elisabeth
Gustawsson, Albin Hillert, Nils-Lennart Johannesson, Clelia LaMonica, Dorte
L ønsmann, Robert Lawson, Magnus Ljung, Biljana Marković, Derrick McClure, David
Minugh, Margareta Olofsson, Reidunn and Joke Palmkvist, Mikael Parkvall, Caryl
Phillips, Chris Robinson, Shi Hui, Peter Trudgill, John Wells, and Annelie Ädel. We
are also grateful to the three anonymous users asked by the publishers to make sugges-
tions for the new edition.
We are also grateful to our students for many vital insights and for helpful comments
on the manuscripts.
The International Phonetic Alphabet is reproduced overleaf by permission of the
International Phonetic Association: IPA Chart, www.internationalphoneticassociation.
org/content/ipa-chart, available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Sharealike 3.0
Unported License. Copyright © 2015 International Phonetic Association.
 THE INTERNATIONAL PHONETIC ALPHABET (revised to 2005)
CONSONANTS (PULMONIC) © 2005 IPA

Bilabial Labiodental Dental Alveolar Post alveolar Retroflex Palatal Velar Uvular Pharyngeal Glottal

Plosive

Nasal

Trill

Tap or Flap

Fricative
Lateral
fricative
Approximant
Lateral
approximant
Where symbols appear in pairs, the one to the right represents a voiced consonant. Shaded areas denote articulations judged impossible.

CONSONANTS (NON-PULMONIC) VOWELS

Front Central Back
Clicks Voiced implosives Ejectives

Bilabial Bilabial ’ Examples:

Close

Dental Dental/alveolar ’ Bilabial

! (Post)alveolar Palatal ’ Dental/alveolar

Close-mid

Palatoalveolar Velar ’ Velar

Alveolar lateral Uvular ’ Alveolar fricative Open-mid

OTHER SYMBOLS
Open
Voiceless labial-velar fricative Alveolo-palatal fricatives Where symbols appear in pairs, the one
to the right represents a rounded vowel.
Voiced labial-velar approximant Voiced alveolar lateral flap

Voiced labial-palatal approximant Simultaneous and SUPRASEGMENTALS

Voiceless epiglottal fricative Primary stress

Affricates and double articulations
(

Voiced epiglottal fricative Secondary stress

can be represented by two symbols
(

joined by a tie bar if necessary.

Epiglottal plosive
Long
DIACRITICS Diacritics may be placed above a symbol with a descender, e.g. Half-long
Extra-short
Voiceless Breathy voiced Dental
Minor (foot) group
Voiced Creaky voiced Apical
Major (intonation) group
Aspirated Linguolabial Laminal
Syllable break
More rounded Labialized Nasalized
Linking (absence of a break)
Less rounded Palatalized Nasal release
TONES AND WORD ACCENTS
Advanced Velarized Lateral release LEVEL
ˆ
CONTOUR
Extra
Retracted Pharyngealized No audible release high or Rising

High Falling
Centralized Velarized or pharyngealized
High
Mid rising
Mid-centralized Raised ( = voiced alveolar fricative) Low
Low
rising
Syllabic Lowered ( = voiced bilabial approximant) Extra Rising-
low falling
Non-syllabic Advanced Tongue Root Downstep Global rise

Rhoticity Retracted Tongue Root Upstep Global fall

Chapter 1

The roots of English

Focus questions
• What is the origin of the English language?
• What language(s) is it most closely related to?

The legendary printer, editor and translator William Caxton, who introduced printing
in England in 1476 and influenced the emergence of a standard language, said this about
the state of the language:

And certaynly our langage now vsed varyeth ferre from that whiche was vsed and
spoken whan I was borne. … Certaynly it is harde to playse euery man by cause of
dyuersite & chaunge of langage.
(Preface to Eneydos [1490])

This could just as well have been voiced by a contemporary observer of the language.
The present-day observer might, for example, react to the sentence Everyone in the street
was shocked when they heard the news, having learnt that everyone should be followed by
he/she, or be utterly confused by the different vowel qualities in accents of English:
the word pen, as pronounced by a New Zealander, is easily perceived as pin by British
speakers.
For a deeper understanding of today’s English with its infinite variation, it is, in fact,
worthwhile travelling even further back in history than Caxton’s time. In this chapter,
we would like to outline the early history of the English language in England; that is,
from its first appearance up to the emergence of a standard language. The standard his-
tory was established by the great historian Bede, writing in Latin about ad 700. The
native people of the British Isles were largely Celtic, but in the southern parts of Great
Britain, they were under Roman rule from around ad 43 to around the year ad 410,
so we can suppose that many spoke Latin as well as a Celtic language. About ad 450,
Bede says, groups of Germanic settlers began coming into the country, driving the
indigenous population into ‘corners’ such as Wales and Cornwall. The invaders, who
probably came from Northern Germany and Denmark, represented three main tribes
of people known as Angles, Saxons and Jutes. The Angles, from whose name the word
English is derived, settled in the North, the Saxons in the South – their name living on
2 The roots of English

in today’s Sussex, Essex and Middlesex – and, according to Bede, the Jutes in a small
area in the South-east, including Kent and the Isle of Wight. These settlers were later
referred to as Anglo-Saxons, and their language, although not documented substantially
until about 300 years later, constitutes the roots of English. In fact, there may have been
Germanic-speaking people in southern England earlier than ad 450, even in Roman
times, and it is likely that the Celtic speakers intermarried and merged with the Anglo-
Saxons, rather than being driven out as a body of people.
The distinct groups of settlers must have produced a dialectally varied language.
Some of these early ‘tribal’ differences can even be traced in rural dialects today; for
example, /f/ and /s/ at the beginning of words or syllables in the standard language
correspond to /v/ and /z/ in the south-west of England (cf. Section 4.1.5.1). ‘Cider
from Somerset’ may, for example, be presented as Zider vrom Zummerzet in local adver-
tising. A few of the words featuring this dialectal characteristic have been adopted in
the standard language, such as vixen, ‘female fox’, and vat (‘large container for liquids’)
(related to German Fass, Swedish fat).
One of the most important reasons for linguistic variation and change is the degree
of contact with speakers of other languages or dialects. Contacts with the indigenous
Celtic population did not, however, result in many borrowings of words into English,
even though the native people would have had a more adequate, traditional vocabulary
at their disposal to describe and categorize the world around them. Such evidence as
there is survives chiefly in place names: river names such as Thames, Avon and Wye,
and place-name elements such as crag, ‘steep and rugged rock’, and cumb, ‘deep valley’
(cf. Ilfracombe). Admittedly, there are also Celtic borrowings of another type in English
now, such as whisky, ‘the water of life’, and galore, ‘lots of ’, but these are of a much later
date. It should also be added that in some parts of Britain which are, or have been,
Celtic strongholds (parts of Scotland, Cornwall), regional dialects of English have fair-
sized elements of Celtic in them. A more thorough account, not restricted to vocabu-
lary, of the impact of this substratum, that is, ‘underlying language’, will follow in
Sections 4.2–4. However, recent ongoing research suggests that the Celtic influence
on English – on all levels of language – has been much more substantial than hitherto
believed (Filppula 2008). Aspects of English, it is argued, can be explained by calling it
‘Germanic in the mouths of Celtic speakers’.
In contrast to the limited evidence of Celtic influence on the vocabulary of English, the
influence of Latin is certainly pervasive. To begin with, this influence may be explained by
the fact that Latin was not the language of conquered people, but of a higher civilization,
from which the Anglo-Saxons had a great deal to learn. Some of the early Latin loan-
words may actually have been adopted even before the Anglo-Saxons left the Continent.
Examples of such early loans are cheese, pepper, street, pound, wall and camp.
With the introduction of Christianity in ad 597, the Latin influence made itself
noticeable in many spheres of life. First, all the words pertaining to the Church were
introduced: altar, angel, candle; also, a certain number of words connected with learning
and education which reflects another aspect of the Church’s influence: school, master,
grammatical. Second, many words connected with everyday life, such as names of articles
of clothing and household utensils, were introduced: sock, chest, sack, cap, as well as words
denoting foods: beet, pear, radish. Third, new names for trees, plants and herbs often
replaced the Anglo-Saxon words: pine, lily, fennel. The influence of Latin again made
itself felt during the Renaissance (around 1500–1650 in Britain), affecting scientific and
 T he roots of English 3

scholarly writing in particular, and it has remained strong to this day. Obviously, since
Classical Latin is no longer a living language, its present-day impact could hardly be
viewed as ‘borrowing’; rather, the Latin element has been integrated into the English
system. This integration includes affixes productive in word-formation, such as re-, in-,
inter-, -fy (reshuffle, incapacitate, interdisciplinary, rectify).
Towards the end of the eighth century, speakers of English, especially in the north-
eastern parts of the British Isles, began to come into contact with speakers of yet another
language variety, namely the Viking invaders from Denmark and Norway. Violence
and barbarity characterized many of the invaders and their encounters with the English
population, but there was, of course, also a great deal of peaceful contact and mutual
benefit, and many individuals became permanent settlers. Language contact was rela-
tively easy because Anglo-Saxon and Old Norse were fairly closely related; both were
Germanic languages and shared a common stock of vocabulary. There were, however,
marked differences in the grammatical systems. According to some recent theories,
Englishmen and Scandinavians can be assumed to have got around certain commu-
nication problems by simplifying the language, for example, by dropping quite a few
inflectional endings. This is, actually, one of the factors that have been brought forward
to explain how English developed into the ‘ending-less’ language it is today. The mod-
ern Scandinavian standard languages and English share some quite unusual features like
‘preposition-stranding’ (That’s the door she went through), and this may be the result of
mutual influence in this period.
Although not as massive as that of Latin or French, the Scandinavian influence has
been substantial and has, characteristically, affected many everyday words which are
close to the core of the language. The very pronunciation of the k’s and g’s in the fol-
lowing words, where Old English equivalents would have had fricatives, is a sign
of Scandinavian origin: sky, bask, whisk, skirt, kid, give, egg. Certain common place-
name elements are Scandinavian, such as -by, -thorpe and -toft for ‘a piece of ground’
(cf. Grimsby, Scunthorpe, Lowestoft). Old Norse has even influenced English pronominal
usage, which is quite sensational in terms of patterns of borrowing: the pronouns they,
their, them are Scandinavian loans, having replaced Anglo-Saxon forms that had grown
too similar to other pronouns to keep them distinct.
In certain dialects spoken in typical ‘Viking areas’, that is, basically what was known
as the Danelaw, the influence has been particularly marked; in Yorkshire, for example,
the following Scandinavian-based words of an everyday character are widely known:
lake ‘play’, neaf ‘fist’, lathe ‘barn’, teem ‘empty’. Owing to the close relationship between
the languages in contact, it can, however, sometimes be quite difficult to determine
which words are truly Scandinavian. A case in point is bairn ‘child’, which is often
brought up as an example of a Scandinavian word; yet similar-sounding forms are – or
were – found in most Germanic languages. Since the use of bairn tends to be restricted
to the northern parts of Britain, it is not unlikely that it has been reinforced by the close
contacts with Scandinavia.
In Shetland and Orkney, which were under Scandinavian rule up to 1469, well
over 95 per cent of the place names and a substantial part of the vocabulary in the
traditional dialects is Scandinavian. A few telling examples of Shetland vocabulary
are: ouskeri is a ‘tool for baling out water’ (cf. Swedish öskar), plagg for ‘garment’
(cf. Swedish plagg), scarf for ‘cormorant’ (a bird, cf. Swedish skarv), du as a less formal
word of address than you.
4 The roots of English

In 1066, the Norman Conquest occurred and had a great effect on English, meaning
that the language was obscured and perhaps at risk of replacement in the two centuries
following this event. During this period, the use of English was socially restricted; it
was not used at court, in church or in government administration. Such restriction gen-
erally tends to be an indication that a language variety is endangered. English, however,
turned out to be a survivor; although it was seen by many as a crude peasant language,
others grew to view it as a marker of ethnicity and national identity. It was formally
reinstated in 1362, when the king’s speech at the opening of Parliament was delivered
in English. In the same year, an Act was passed making English instead of French the
official language of the law courts.
English started to be written again at the end of the eleventh century in different
forms from the Old English which had been a fairly standardised written language
before the Conquest. It has been suggested that these new forms reflect the speech of
ordinary people even before the Conquest, and that their differences from standardised
Old English reflect the influence of Celtic and Scandinavian languages on the everyday
language of Anglo-Saxon England and Scotland.
During its heyday in Britain, however, French had an enormous impact on the lin-
guistic repertoire and on the English language itself. As already suggested, it was the
most prestigious language variety. The following is a much-quoted remark made by
the late-thirteenth-century chronicler Robert of Gloucester: ‘Bote a man conne Frens,
me telþ of him lute’ (‘unless a man knows French, people think little of him’) (Wright
1887:544).
French was the language of law, administration, business and sophisticated life, and
this is reflected, for example, in the following borrowings, picked from among the
10,000 that were adopted from the time of the Norman Conquest up to about 1500:
judge, cordial, faith, faint, veil. It is interesting that French words were introduced to denote
the meat from certain animals, whereas the names of the animals remained English:
pork from pigs, veal from calves, mutton from sheep, venison from deer. This is generally
explained by the fact that French cooking was seen as superior.
In the period immediately following the Conquest, loanwords were from Norman
French, rather than from a Parisian standard. Some of these words were borrowed again
in their Parisian French form and came to be used in a slightly different way from
their Norman counterparts – another factor which has enriched the English language.
Examples of such pairs are warrant ‘guarantee’ and warden ‘guardian’. It is also worth
pointing out that the French influence on the English language has continued over the
centuries, but has been mostly restricted to certain areas, such as etiquette, literary ter-
minology, fashion and cookery. The influence has also made itself noticeable in certain
grammatical structures and the placement of stress in French-based words such as canal,
hotel, antique.
In addition to borrowings from the sources mentioned so far, English has, in various
periods, been influenced by many other languages: Dutch/Low German – for example,
with regard to boating terms – High German, Spanish, Portuguese, Italian, Yiddish,
Hindi and Afrikaans. Since these influences tend to be connected with certain varieties of
English, they are highlighted in Chapter 4, which also deals with the considerable histori-
cally based regional variation in the British Isles, including the special case of Scots.
Towards the end of the fifteenth century, when English was firmly reinstated as the
language of power and the art of printing began to exercise an influence on the style of
 T he roots of English 5

writing, a standard language began to emerge. Earlier, writing had been clearly dialectal
and extremely varied with regard to spelling, vocabulary and grammar. The developing
standard was London-based – in particular, it reflected the language of the prosper-
ous middle-class businessmen who had moved into London from an area north-east of
the city. The influential University of Cambridge in that area is also believed to have
played an important role here. Not until the eighteenth century, however, were English
spelling and grammar codified in a standard form; this happened when the legendary
Dr Samuel Johnson published his famous dictionary in 1755. As for a standard of pro-
nunciation, it hardly existed before the latter half of the nineteenth century, when pub-
lic school usage made a certain southern accent more prestigious than other varieties.

Review questions
1 Why do you think the Celtic element in English is so limited?
2 Why was it comparatively easy for the English and the descendants of Scandinavians
to communicate?
3 In what way did French ‘endanger’ English after the Norman Conquest? Where
might English be ‘endangering’ other languages at present?

Further reading
Hogg, R. and Denison, D. (2006) (eds) A History of the English Language. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge
University Press.
Chapter 2

The spread of English

Focus questions
• Why has English become a global language?
• In what order were the following territories settled from Britain: Australia, Barbados,
Canada, Jamaica, New Zealand, South Africa, the United States?
• Many people in Africa use English for some purposes and other languages for others.
Why and for what purposes?

Hundreds of millions of people use English every day nearly everywhere in the world;
it is, for example, the main language of air-traffic control, international business and
academic conferences, technology, diplomacy and sport. By contrast, about 400 years
ago, Richard Mulcaster, a schoolmaster and linguist, conceded ‘But it may be replied
again that our English tongue … is of small reach, it stretcheth no further than this
island of ours, nay not there over all’ (Mulcaster 1582:285).
It is typical of the spread of languages over large areas that it is led by military action
and the formation of empires. Once the language is known over a wide area, it becomes
a useful medium of communication and takes on a dynamic of its own, even where the
military and political forces behind it have weakened. The conquests of Alexander the
Great (356–323 bc) and the subsequent monarchies in Egypt and South-west Asia led
to Greek being widely known in the area and becoming an ‘international’ language.
The conquests of the Islamic armies 900 years later meant that Arabic became widely
known and gradually adopted even as a first language over an area overlapping with that
in which Greek had previously played a similar role.
When Mulcaster made his pronouncement, Western imperialism had, in fact, already
started and English was embarking on its expansion throughout the world. It is com-
mon to divide Britain’s former colonial possessions into three categories: trading colo-
nies, consisting merely of a city or strip of coastal land; settlement colonies, in which
the indigenous people are expelled from their land and it is occupied by people from (or
sponsored by) the colonising power; and exploitation colonies, where the indigenous
people are not expelled but their land is used for the benefit of people from the colonis-
ing power. We will discuss first the major settlement colonies.
With the arrival of the sizeable groups of settlers in Massachusetts in the early seven-
teenth century, among them the Pilgrim Fathers in Plymouth, the colonization of North
 T he spread of English 7

America and the replacement of the indigenous people by Europeans and Africans really
got under way. In 1640, there were 25,000 English speakers in New England alone,
and because Britain drove out the non-English colonial powers, subsequent immigrants
learned English, wherever they came from. The result is the United States, by far the
largest and most important predominantly English-speaking country.
At the same time as the United States was first settled, that is, in the course of the
seventeenth century, many Caribbean islands like Jamaica, Barbados and Trinidad, as
well as parts of Guiana on the mainland, were seized by Britain and settled by landown-
ers, workers and slaves who were, or became, English-speaking. The indigenous Caribs
were exterminated. In 1658, the settler population of Jamaica (from Britain, Ireland and
the Americas) was 7,000. The profits from sugar plantations with slave labour in these
territories were the capital on which the later expansion of the British Empire was built.
Although the largest Caribbean states are Spanish-speaking and people in many islands
use French or Dutch, the Caribbean includes many English-speaking communities and
many of the oldest outside the British Isles.
One part of what is now Canada has been English-speaking since the seventeenth
century, namely the British settlement colony of Newfoundland whose traditional dia-
lect has Irish, Scots and West Country features, as well as a distinct flavour of its own.
But in 1763, when the rest of Canada was taken from the French, it had almost no
English-speaking settlers. The number of English speakers in ‘Canada proper’ increased
rapidly after the end of the American War of Independence, when there was a mass
migration of civilian and military refugees, the so-called United Empire Loyalists who
moved from the new United States to New Brunswick and Nova Scotia. The result is
that modern Canada is largely English-speaking, using a variety related to that of the
United States, with a compact group in Quebec who use French for all purposes.
Towards the end of the eighteenth century, the first British settlers arrived in Australia
and New Zealand. As is well known, a large proportion of the Australian immigrants
did not voluntarily move ‘down under’; they were prisoners assigned to the penal colo-
nies in New South Wales because the British jails were overcrowded. This convict
system operated from 1788 to 1840 and in all some 130,000 prisoners were transported.
The early settlers in New Zealand were not prisoners, however. There was an unofficial
early settlement of whalers, and not until 1840 was an official colony established when
the British Government signed the Treaty of Waitangi with the Maori chiefs. Although
initially settlers in Australia and New Zealand mainly came from the British Isles, more
recently there has been immigration from a variety of non-English-speaking countries;
the descendants of these immigrants and the surviving indigenous people are, or are
becoming, English-dominant.
Britain captured the Cape Province of South Africa from the Dutch in 1806 and thus,
as in Canada, acquired a settlement colony already occupied by settlers who did not speak
English. A few other areas in Africa were seen by the British authorities as being suitable
for settlement colonies in the nineteenth and especially the early twentieth century. As a
result, there are substantial numbers of English-speaking people in South Africa, and there
are communities of English-speaking Europeans in Zimbabwe and Kenya.
Most users of English in the British Isles, the United States, Canada, Australia, New
Zealand, Jamaica, Barbados, many other territories in the Caribbean and other islands
and island groups – such as the Falkland Islands, St Helena and Tristan da Cunha – as
well as a sizeable proportion of the inhabitants of South Africa are native speakers of
8 The spread of English

English and use it as their first language. Most of these speech communities have set
their own standards, which have been codified in dictionaries. They will be presented
in detail in Chapter 4, where we follow Kachru (1985:12) in referring to these as ‘the
inner circle’ (see Section 3.4.3.1 for more details).
British (later US) trading and colonialism also brought English to trading and exploi-
tation colonies. For example, the Indian subcontinent was first exposed to English in
1600 when the British East India Company was formed, and the use of English increased
along with British power on the subcontinent and the spread of English-medium educa-
tion in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
It was also in the early seventeenth century that the very first contacts were made
with West Africa, and trading posts, later trading colonies, were set up for the trade in
slaves. By 1800, English was well-established in West Africa and in trading colonies in
other parts of the world. During the nineteenth century, India and many territories in
Africa and South-east Asia became exploitation colonies, and government, business,
and missionary activity spread a knowledge of English. In the postcolonial era, English
is used as a second language (ESL) in most of these countries; it is quite widely used
in business and government, often officially recognized and is used as the medium of
teaching. The English used in these areas often differs radically from inner-circle varie-
ties, and is a characteristic of the local speakers (cf. Section 3.3). It is hard to say with
any precision how many proficient speakers of English there are in these countries.
Graddol cited a figure of 750 million in 2006, and we can assume that it is much higher
in 2018. India probably has as many speakers as the United States at least, Nigeria and
the Philippines may have more than Britain and there are very many more in other post-
colonial countries around the world. These varieties of English, especially those with
official status, are often referred to as the New Englishes, although Mufwene (2000:9)
argues that the term ‘new English’ should apply to all varieties identifiable as English
today, ‘since every spoken language is adapted by its speakers to current communicative
needs and contexts’. These varieties will be the subject matter of Chapter 5, where we
use Kachru’s term ‘the outer circle’ (Kachru 1985).
The ‘circles model’ is summarized in Figure 2.1. It was developed by Kachru more
than a generation ago, before the collapse of the Soviet Union and the rise of the internet.

Outer Circle Expanding Circle

Inner Circle
People need English for People need English for
Most people
secondary education, communication in business,
have English as
politics, law, business politics, education, etc.,
first language –
INSIDE the country: primarily with speakers of
UK, USA,
India, ‘anglophone’ other languages from
Caribbean,
Africa, Philippines, OUTSIDE the country:
Canada,
Singapore? most European and East
Australia, NZ.
Bangladesh? Asian countries.

Figure 2.1 Kachru’s circles model.

 T he spread of English 9

It is basically a classification of nation-states according to the uses made of English

within their frontiers (see Section 3.4.4.1). It remains a useful schema for understanding
uses of English, but globalization, migration and the prevalence of computer-mediated
communication among people far apart from one another physically have changed the
nature of interaction in English. Kachru’s original version showed concentric circles
with the Inner Circle at the centre and the Expanding at the periphery, but we show a
version which attempts to reduce the ‘imperial’ implications of this.
English is used extremely widely today among speakers who have acquired it as a
language for use with foreigners, or increasingly in education, rather than in their own
government bodies, courts, political fora and so on. There are probably more such users
in this group than in either of the others. They often communicate with other non-
native users in what are called English as a Lingua Franca (ELF, not to be confused
with EFL = English as a Foreign Language!) situations. Chapter 6 discusses the role
of English as an international language of communication – its use in the ‘expanding
circle’ created by globalization and the characteristics of the English that is used in them.
Distinctive varieties are developing in this expanding circle, and we discuss the nature
and significance of a few of them as examples. The massive exposure to, and use of,
English also tends to result in a heavy impact on the first language of its users.
Whereas a number of countries fit extremely well into one of the three circle catego-
ries, uses and varieties of English are characterized by shifting status – for example, due
to the increasing use of English as the medium of instruction in EFL countries – or tend
to be viewed differently in the literature. In particular, the distinction between ‘second’
and ‘foreign’ is fuzzy (cf. Section 3.3); confusingly, the branch of applied linguistics
studying the teaching and learning of foreign languages usually refers to this as second
language acquisition (SLA).
It is impossible to say with any accuracy how many people speak English at present.
Obviously, the EFL category is particularly difficult to pinpoint; it really depends on
what level of proficiency a person should have to qualify as a speaker of English. Twenty
years ago, Graddol (1997) suggested the following figures:

First-language speakers: 375 million

Second-language speakers: 375 million
Foreign-language speakers: 750 million

Populations, the penetration of education and the predominance of foreign-language

speakers have increased greatly since that estimate was made, but it is still common to
cite a figure of 1,500 million competent users of English. In any case ‘foreign-language’
has become inappropriate. In 2006, Graddol suggested that knowledge of English could
be becoming universal among educated people:

The role of education in school is now seen as to provide the generic skills needed
to acquire new knowledge and specialist skills in the future: learning how to learn.
Literacy in the national language and perhaps the mother tongue where that is dif-
ferent, remains a basic skill, as does numeracy. But information technology – how
to use computers and applications such as word processors, spreadsheets and internet
browsers – has become just as important in basic education. In globalized econo-
mies, English seems to have joined this list of basic skills. Quite simply, its function
10 The spread of English

and place in the curriculum is no longer that of ‘foreign language’ and this is bring-
ing about profound changes in who is learning English, their motives for learning
it and their needs as learners.
(Graddol 2006:57)

Mandarin Chinese and probably Spanish have more native speakers, but at present they
have neither the global sway nor the multi-functional use that characterizes English
today. It is also true that Latin in its day was widely diffused in its popular or ‘vulgar’
forms and that Classical Latin was, for many centuries, the language of scientists and
scholars in much the same way as English is now, but, for obvious reasons, this cannot
be compared with the worldwide spread and the all-pervasive influence of English that
has been witnessed in the latter half of the twentieth century and beyond.
It is convenient for many learners that English has few grammatical endings and
vocabulary derived from both Romance and Germanic roots, but it is particularly
inconvenient that it has a very irrational spelling system. The main reason for the cur-
rent status of English is not to do with linguistic advantages or disadvantages of this
kind; just as the concept of language can be clarified by defining it as ‘a dialect with an
army and a navy’, the special position of English in a worldwide perspective must be
related to political/economic power and historical coincidence. In other words: the fact
that English is now an influential world language is not in any way due to its superior-
ity as a language, but is a result of the activities of its speakers over the centuries. As we
have tried to suggest, empires spread languages, and the British Empire and the United
States have been no exceptions. But as with Greek and Latin, once the language has
been spread, it is available for those who have learnt it to use for their own purposes.
Empires and colonialism are based on oppression and they cause suffering, and politi-
cal and linguistic dominance can lead to cultural imperialism. Our focus in writing this
book is not on these issues but on the forms of the language; on the expressivity, varia-
tion and changeability of a language which has grown up and left home and now seems
to be a resource worldwide.
Before looking more closely at its many varieties, however, we should clarify our
framework for classifying and describing them; this is the purpose of Chapter 3.

Review questions
1 Where did most of the early English-speaking settlers in Canada come from?
2 Why might Indian English be called a ‘New English’? Given that it probably dates back
to 1800 or so, what objection might be made?
3 Why do estimates of the numbers of people who know English vary so much?
4 Why is English a world language?

Further reading
Graddol, D. (2006) English Next. London: British Council. Available: (https://englishagenda.
britishcouncil.org/continuing-professional-development/cpd-researchers/english-next [accessed
29 November 2018]).
Chapter 3

Variation in English

Focus questions
• What is the difference between an accent and a dialect?
• In your own English: Do you use the spelling colour or color? Does lawn rhyme with
corn? What does pavement mean?
• Why and how are new words formed (‘coined’) in World Englishes?
• What is Standard English?

The main purpose of this chapter is to provide a framework for the presentation of varie-
ties of English around the globe. Throughout the chapter, any examples illustrating terms
and concepts are directly related to the subject matter of this book. The first section is
devoted to a discussion of the character and possible causes of linguistic variation and
change. The following section presents types of variation at various levels of language,
setting up the structure for detailed descriptions of individual varieties in Chapters 4–6.
Finally, the classification of World Englishes is discussed along several dimensions.

3.1 Linguistic diversity and diffusion

3.1.1 Models and explanations
The diversity of language can, at least to some extent, be accounted for by using models
such as ‘language family trees’, suggesting genetic relationships and temporal as well as
spatial divergence. Although electronic communication and rapid travel make spatial
divergence a somewhat problematic factor in the twenty-first century, it remains essen-
tial to understand how we arrived at the present situation. The tree model, a typical
expression of nineteenth-century German philology, was essentially adopted by the
influential twentieth-century linguist Ferdinand de Saussure as well. He envisages the
emergence of ‘dialect splits’ in the following way: a language, originally quite uniform,
existing on two isolated islands, will eventually and gradually split into two dialects.
This is said to be ‘purely a function of time’, although it obviously also points to spatial
causation – for example, relative isolation due to physical barriers such as water, forests
and mountains (de Saussure [1916] 1974).
The reasons for the development of regional linguistic differences are, however,
rather more complex and not completely understood. The branch of modern linguistics
12 Variation in English

known as sociolinguistics has made great strides towards a more sophisticated under-
standing of linguistic differentiation. Whereas some features can probably only be
explained as independent innovations, others are the results of social rather than purely
geographical phenomena: the strong sense of togetherness in certain speech commu-
nities and the search for a marked identity; the possibility and frequency of contacts
with other groups of people; social mobility; linguistic accommodation; urbaniza-
tion. Recent linguistic innovation and spread can, indeed, to a large extent, be ascribed
to the last-mentioned phenomenon.
In Chapter 4, we will take a closer look at some linguistic scenarios where urban
centres seem to play a crucial role in the diffusion of innovations, such as the impact of
London English in Britain and the ‘Northern Cities vowel shifts’ in the United States.
In attempting to account for the causes and effects of language change, a distinction is
usually made between internal (endogenous) and external (exogenous) explanations,
that is, ‘whether change is brought about by pressures internal to the linguistic system
itself, or whether it is the speakers who can be held responsible, adopting forms from
other varieties’ (Foulkes and Docherty 1999:10). Clearly, however, linguistic changes
may also be brought about by social factors within the same variety (cf. Hickey 1999,
describing the impact of ‘fashionable Dublin’).

3.1.2 Some basic concepts: language, dialect, accent

Without further specification, the terms language, dialect and accent have already
been used in this book but they are not so easily defined. Here we discuss these terms and
introduce some other concepts that are relevant for our presentation of world Englishes.
The difference between language and dialect is not clear-cut. It is often suggested
that languages are autonomous, whereas dialects are heteronomous; in other words,
we can say that ‘X is a dialect of language Y’, or ‘Y has the dialects X and Z’, but never
‘Y is a language of dialect X’. There is a great deal of truth in this distinction, but it is
contentious in borderline cases such as the status of Scots (see Section 4.3.2.2).
The most realistic distinction is probably ‘A language is a dialect with an army and
a navy’, in a formulation attributed to the linguist Max Weinreich, i.e. it is extra lin-
guistic, not based on language itself, but on the political situation in the real world.
The point is that the names of languages tend to be related to the names of independent
political entities, ‘polities’: Danish, for example, is the language spoken in Denmark. Yet
this distinction obviously does not apply to English, considering that it is the sole official
language of more than 20 nations.
Another difference is said to be that dialects, in contrast with languages, are mutu-
ally intelligible. Yet this is not always the case. For example, Milroy (1994:161) gives an
example where speakers of English from Ireland and those from England misunderstand
each other because they use the present tense in How long are you here for? with different
time references – the Irish for the period since arrival (‘How long have you been here?’)
and the English for the period before departure (‘How long will you be here?’). This
type of quite subtle difference is a common cause of misunderstanding among speakers
of different varieties.
It is also true that non-standard dialects are characteristically spoken and do not, like
standard languages, have a codified written form, laid down in dictionaries and gram-
mar books (see Section 3.4.2.2). Regional/social or non-standard dialects are, however,
frequently reflected in writing: in fiction (though usually restricted to dialogue), in
 Variation in English 13

local publications, in school essays (at least in speech communities where dialect writing
is encouraged) and also in online informal conversational writing (see Section 3.2.1.2).
It is true that non-standard written representation can but rarely rely on set gram-
matical rules or systematic spelling conventions, and therefore tends to be idiosyncratic,
incomplete and inconsistent (cf. Taavitsainen and Melchers 1999). In this book, the text
samples that are included in Chapters 4 and 5 represent different varieties of Standard
English, but we have also included samples of non-standard language to illustrate char-
acteristic regional/social features.
Dialects are also said to be used only in certain domains, whereas languages show
maximal variation or ‘elaboration of function’. This has to do with the situational use of
language in a society. The term domain simply stands for ‘a recurring situation type’,
‘a definable context of life in a society’. Typical domains are the school, the family,
work, local and national administration, religion and the media. Non-standard dialects
may, for example, be restricted to family life, possibly to work and – marginally – to
school. A vigorous living dialect or language is characterized by use in several domains;
loss of a domain is often an indication that the dialect is endangered, as studies of a
Scottish Gaelic dialect have shown (Dorian 1981).
The difference between dialect and accent is usually formulated thus: accent dif-
ferences concern only differences in pronunciation, whereas dialectal differences con-
cern all of pronunciation, grammar and vocabulary. In order to avoid the oftentimes
challenging distinctions between language and dialect, and even dialect and accent,
linguists tend to prefer a more neutral term, namely variety, which, in a looser sense,
covers both concepts of dialect and accent. While the term comes with its own set of
complexities, it is, as the reader will already have noticed, generally used in referring to
World Englishes.
In an introductory textbook aiming to describe worldwide variation in English, it is
not possible to include very localized regional dialects or fine social distinctions. Rather,
the focus will lean towards the standard varieties, such as Standard Canadian English,
and the various accents associated with them. Whenever regional/social variation is
considerable, however, and when it has played a part in the shaping of ‘transported’
Englishes, it will be accounted for.

3.2 Types of variation in form

If we imagine a large sample of formal written texts and recordings of English (or pieces
of conversational writing like Facebook messages) from all over the world, we would
find that the published written texts are generally very similar, with almost identical
grammar, spelling that varies in a few well-defined areas and limited variation in lexis.
Of course, we will find a few formal written texts in other dialects, like this extract
from a poem which represents the pronunciation (gorra ‘got a’) and lexis (cannit ‘can’t’,
bairn ‘child’) of the Geordie dialect of Newcastle in North-east England:

A hev gorra bairn

an a hev gorra wife
an a cannit see me bairn or wife
workin in the night
(Tom Pickard, from Horovitz, M. [ed.]
[1969] Children of Albion:259)
14 Variation in English

Such texts will be extremely rare, with the majority much more uniform. This reflects
the fact that most published written texts are in the same dialect, the one we call
‘Standard English’ discussed earlier. On the basis of small variations in spelling, lexis
and grammar, we will be able to group these texts into varieties of Standard English.
The spoken texts, and conversational written ones, will vary widely in pronuncia-
tion and more widely in orthography, grammar and lexis than the written ones. Spoken
and conversational written language is generally less influenced by the formal standard
than written. These differences mean that we will be able to divide these texts up into
a fairly large number of varieties, with common features within the groups and predict-
able differences between them. However, we would not expect every speaker to use one
and only one variety, because of the effect of context; we know that speakers often use
one variety at work and another with their friends, for example. Furthermore, personal
mobility and the availability of all varieties all over the world in social and mass media
mean that we will not find many instances of a ‘pure’ variety. Nor would we expect all
the texts in a group to have identical features, even at the same level of formality; we
know there is variety ‘inside’ varieties.
Variation in World Englishes can thus be found at all levels of language: spelling,
phonetics/phonology, morphology, syntax, the lexicon (vocabulary) and discourse. In
the following presentation, we give an introduction to this variation and outline our
descriptive framework. We begin with the smallest units in writing and speech and end
with some aspects of discourse pragmatics.

3.2.1 Spelling
3.2.1.1 Formal spelling
Most formal written texts are produced in codified, standard varieties, where spelling is
regulated by authoritative dictionaries. Although varieties of (World) Standard English
are generally characterized by great similarity at this level of language, there are some
well-known exceptions, such as the British–American diversity, mostly rule-governed
as in travelled vs traveled, centre vs center, colour vs color. Most of the American spelling con-
ventions were created by Noah Webster, who in 1789 proposed an ‘American Standard’.
It was partly a matter of honour ‘as an independent nation … to have a system of our
own, in language as well as government’ (Crystal 1995:80).
In some transported Englishes, there is great variability in spelling and usage varies
for regional, social and political reasons. A worldwide survey for a prospective inter-
national style guide, Langscape, reports on the language preferences of supraregional
reading/writing communities and on their affiliations to the British–American divide
(Peters 2001). McArthur (2001:5) claims that ‘we already have a single print standard
for world English, which consists of dual institutions for spelling and punctuation’.
As already mentioned, Scots, with its long written tradition, holds a special posi-
tion, arguably as a language in its own right (cf. Section 4.3.2.2). Those who argue
that Scots is a language distinct from English claim that it therefore merits a distinct
orthography (McClure 1995:41). The exact character of this orthography, however,
is subject to debate, if not controversy. The most serious attempt to supply a codifica-
tion and formal recommendation for Scots spelling is the ‘Makars’ Style Sheet’, created
in 1947 by a group of writers, but according to McClure (1995:43), ‘the prospect of an
 Variation in English 15

officially-recognized standard orthography for Scots is as remote in 1995 as it was ten

years previously’.
Finally, it is worth noting that English-based pidgins and creoles rarely, as yet,
have standardized orthographies (cf. Romaine 1988:111). Broadly speaking, written
representations of these varieties are characterized by a desire for a closer relationship
between spelling and pronunciation than in standard orthographies, for example bi-long
for ‘belong’, kwin for ‘queen’ (Tok Pisin, Papua New Guinea). In Jamaica, schools teach
a standard orthography for ‘patwa’ or Jamaican Creole as a route into Standard English.
Children learn the spellings joj and choch before judge and church, for example.

3.2.1.2 Spelling in informal conversational writing

We have to distinguish sharply between formal texts and conversational written ones,
often in computer-mediated communication. In conversational written texts, differ-
ences of style can be marked by differences of spelling convention, so that an informal
style is marked by nonstandard spelling as well as features of nonstandard grammar. The
various types of nonstandard spelling can be classified as follows:

1 number/letter rebus (2B or not 2B, c u l8r m8);

2 clipping (HAVE = hav, FRIDAY = fri);
3 abbreviation (GOOD = gd, FROM = frm);
4 initialisms (btw, lol);
5 expressive respelling: orally (looong), or merely visually (luvvvvv) iconic;
6 representation of colloquial spoken forms (BEING = bein, THE = da);
7 regularization of irregular spelling (NIGHT = nite, nyt, BECAUSE = coz, cuz).

Several of these are interesting in the present context because they allow local pro-
nunciations to appear. While da, somehow representing a fashionable Afro-American
pronunciation, is common everywhere as a spelling for the, de is particularly common in
texts originating from Ireland as a representation of an Irish pronunciation. The spell-
ings wut and cuz for what and (be)cause are common in US texts, while wot and coz are
more common in those from England.

3.2.2 Phonetics/phonology
This level of language is the most distinctive in the characterization of varieties
of English; in fact, the distinction and divergence in English accents appears to be
increasing, whereas at other levels, such as syntax, varieties are rather converging
(Trudgill 1998b).
We assume a knowledge of basic phonetics, such as the speech organs, the difference
between vowels and consonants (including the concept of approximants), the general
classification and description of speech sounds and some aspects of prosody, such as the
structure of the syllable and forms and function of intonation. Similarly, we presuppose
the elements of phonology, especially the concept of phoneme. Those who need to
brush up on any of these topics should look at one of the standard textbooks (Davenport
and Hannahs 2011, Cruttenden 2008, Ladefoged and Johnson 2010, Roach 2009). We
have included the latest IPA (International Phonetic Association) chart (see page x), but
16 Variation in English

have tried to avoid using extremely narrow phonetic transcription with an array of
diacritics. If an accent of English is characterized by very special phonetic realizations,
this will usually be described in words rather than by adding a number of additional
symbols. As is customary, // is used to indicate phonemic transcriptions, whereas [] is
used for allophonic transcriptions (cf. the description of the /ɑː/ phoneme in RP and
Australian English later in this section) and occasionally also for impressionistic notation
without relying on phonological analysis. Any symbols (letters) enclosed in <> refer to
spelling, not pronunciation.
In the following, we also list and exemplify a few terms that are often used in the
book, but that may not be familiar to those whose phonetic training has been exclu-
sively based on the British elite accent called Received Pronunciation (RP) (‘BBC
English’, ‘Queen’s English’) or General American (‘network English’):

glottal: a sound produced in the larynx, due to the closure or narrowing of the glottis,
as in the initial consonant [h] of happy and in the glottal stop [ʔ], which is stereo-
typically connected with London Cockney but actually found in various accents
around the Englishspeaking world.
retrof lex: a position slightly further back than alveolar, with the tip of the tongue bent
or ‘curled’ backwards, as generally in r’s produced by Americans and speakers from
England’s West Country (the South-west).
tapped: refers to consonants that are related to trills; the difference is that the move-
ment is momentary: there is only one beat (tap), which is usually produced by the
tip of the tongue. A tapped /r/ which is represented as [ ɾ] and sounds almost like a
[d] is common in some accents of British English, especially between vowels, as in
very, hurry. This sound is also characteristic of most varieties of American English,
but as a realization of intervocalic /t/, as in city, latter.
trilled (rolled): refers to certain types of /r/ and stands for the rapid, repeated tapping of
one speech organ against another. It is something of a stereotype that front trills –
in which the tip of the tongue is used – are characteristic of Scottish English (cf.
Section 4.3.3.2). According to Catford (1994:70), ‘the apico-alveolar trill [r] is …
a type of r traditionally used by stage Scotsmen’.
uvular: the back of the tongue against the uvula. Unlike many European languages,
English does not generally have uvular, ‘back’ /r/, but there is a highly recessive
pocket in North-east England where it may possibly be heard under the name of
the ‘Northumbrian burr’, and some Scottish speakers use it variably, as for example
in the recording of the Glasgow speaker number 5.
wide: a term used about diphthongs that are characterized by a relatively long distance
from the starting-point to the finishing-point. Some Broad Australian diphthongs,
for example, are typically wider than their correspondences in the reference accent
(RP) as in [saɪ] rather than [seɪ] for say (cf. Section 4.7.2.3).

In comparing accents of English around the globe, we should consider the phonemic
inventory, that is, the set-up of distinctive units, as well as the phonetic output, that is,
the various allophones. The average listener will no doubt find the most striking dif-
ferences in the actual output; variation in vowel quality, in particular, is enormous. Two
accents, such as RP and General Australian English, may have exactly the same number
of distinctive units (phonemes), and yet sound very different indeed. Both accents, for
example, have an /ɑː/ phoneme, as in palm, father, which is realized as [ ɑː] in RP, but as
 Variation in English 17

a front [aː] by most Australian speakers. To take another example: the minimal pair
bed/bad will apply to all native-speaker varieties of English, but the actual contrastive
sounds vary drastically in quality: in New Zealand English, they approximate to bid/bed
as pronounced by an RP speaker. Not surprisingly, such differences may lead to cross-
dialectal misunderstandings.
There are, however, also important differences among World Englishes with regard
to the phonemic inventory. Comparing RP and the somewhat constructed ‘average’
accent General American, which may be referred to as the two reference accents, we
find that the vowel systems differ quite substantially. The most striking difference is that
American English has fewer diphthongs, generally lacking centring ones and having
a monophthong in words such as goat. Scottish English has even fewer diphthongs, and
African as well as Caribbean English varieties tend to have restricted vowel systems with
many mergers.
We wish to emphasize that the only reason for our frequent comparisons made to the
reference accents, especially RP, is that they are well-defined and, above all, generally
well-known to students of English. In using them as yardsticks, we are neither saying
that they are superior to other accents, nor that they are the original sources from which
all other accents have developed.
A useful and widely quoted attempt at a worldwide classification of English accents
was made by Trudgill and Hannah in their textbook International English, first published
in 1982 (2008/1994). It should be pointed out that this ‘typology’ relates to fairly stand-
ardized, first-language varieties only. The classification identifies four main types of
English:

1 ‘English-based’, including English as spoken in England and Wales, but also in

South Africa, Australia and New Zealand;
2 ‘American-based’, including English as spoken in the United States and Canada;
3 ‘Scottish-based’, including Scotland and Northern Ireland;
4 ‘Irish-based’, exclusively found in the Republic of Ireland.

Trudgill and Hannah (2008:10) give 11 criteria distinguishing accents of English and
identifying the four types. Some of the most important criteria are:

•• the choice of vowel (/ɑː/ vs /æ /) in words such as bath, half, dance;

•• the absence (in what are called nonrhotic accents) or presence (in rhotic accents)
of /r/ in final position or before a consonant (nonprevocalic /r/), as in hear, work;
•• the degree of closeness in the front vowels, as in pen, pan;
•• a front or back vowel in words such as father, part;
•• absence or presence of contrast in length and vowel quality in word pairs such as
cot–caught;
•• absence or presence of voice in intervocalic /t/, as in later, letter.

Absence of nonprevocalic /r/, for example, is characteristic of ‘English-based’ accents,

whereas voicing of intervocalic /t/ is found in ‘American-based accents’ and the lack of con-
trast in cot–caught is typical of Scottish-based accents, but also Standard Canadian English.
Wells (1982:181ff.), setting up a typology for accents of English based exclusively
on vowels, suggests virtually the same four types, namely Type I: provincial southern
Irish English; interestingly, also valid for Jamaica and Barbados; Type II: RP, Australia,
18 Variation in English

New Zealand, South Africa, ‘and indeed most accents of England and Wales’; Type III:
General American and Canada; Type IV: Scotland and Northern Ireland. His two main
factors are systemic differences in the vowel system and the phonological distribution
of these vowels, particularly in words such as near and square. As a shortcut in assigning
accents to types, the following table is suggested (Wells 1982:183):

I II III IV

1 Does lawn rhyme with corn? No Yes No No

2 Does minor rhyme with nearer? No No Yes No
3 Does good rhyme with mood? No No No Yes

1–3 in the table exemplify differences in historical phonology. As we have seen earlier,
Type II accents are characterized by absence of nonprevocalic /r/; hence lawn rhymes
with corn. Type III accents only have undergone a change in which nonsyllabic [ ə ]
disappeared between a vowel and a following /r/, thus making nearer rhyme with mirror
and sharing with herring (Wells 1982:244). In Type IV accents, Middle English /u/ and
/uː/ have merged. It would appear, then, that Type I accents, having undergone none of
these changes, are the most traditional.
In the detailed presentation of accents to follow in Chapters 4 and 5, we will use the
framework provided in Wells 1982, that is, the so-called ‘standard lexical sets’ which are
by now well established in the literature.

Throughout the work, use is made of the concept of standard lexical sets. These
enable one to refer concisely to large groups of words which tend to share the
same vowel, and to the vowel which they share. They are based on the vowel cor-
respondences which apply between British Received Pronunciation and (a variety
of ) General American, and make use of keywords intended to be unmistakable, no
­matter what accent one says them in. Thus “the KIT words” refer to “ship, bridge,
milk … ”; “the KIT vowel” refers to the vowel these words have (in most accents, /ɪ/);
both may just be referred to as KIT.
(Wells 1982:xviii)

In other words: since the actual phonetic quality of the KIT vowel may vary (in New
Zealand English, for example, it approximates to /ə /), ‘the KIT vowel’ is a much better
reference point than ‘the /ɪ/ vowel’.
The 24 standard lexical sets are shown in Table 3.1.
Note that the standard lexical sets are exclusively designed to provide a framework
for variation in vowels. On the other hand, it is of course true that some sets, such
as NEAR and SQUARE, are very much conditioned by consonants in the phonetic
environment. Our presentation of accents will, of course, also include characteristic
consonantal features. There is, for example, considerable variation in the quality of /r/
and /l/ and in the realization of /θ/ and /ð/.
So far, our description of English phonetics/phonology has been restricted to seg-
ments, that is, individual sounds (vowels, consonants). All accents are however also
 Variation in English 19

Table 3.1 The 24 standard lexical sets

GA RP Keyword Wells’ examples

ɪ ɪ KIT ship, sick, bridge, milk, myth, busy

ε e DRESS step, neck, edge, shelf, friend, ready
æ Æ TRAP tap, back, badge, scalp, hand, cancel
ɑ ɒ LOT stop, sock, dodge, romp, quality
ʌ ʌ STRUT cup, suck, budge, pulse, trunk
ʊ ʊ FOOT put, bush, full, good, look, wolf
æ ɑː BATH staff, brass, ask, dance, sample, calf
ɔ ɒ CLOTH cough, broth, cross, long, Boston
ɜr ɜː NURSE hurt, lurk, urge, burst, jerk, term
i iː FLEECE creep, speak, leave, feel, key, people
eɪ eɪ FACE tape, cake, raid, veil, steak, day
ɑ ɑː PALM psalm, father, bra, spa, lager
ɔ ɔː THOUGHT taught, sauce, hawk, jaw, broad
o əʊ GOAT soap, joke, home, know, so, roll
u uː GOOSE loop, shoot, tomb, mute, huge, view
aɪ aɪ PRICE ripe, write, arrive, high, try, buy
ɔɪ ɔɪ CHOICE adroit, noise, join, toy, royal
aʊ aʊ MOUTH out, house, loud, count, crowd, cow
ɪr ɪə NEAR beer, sincere, fear, beard, serum
εr εə SQUARE care, fair, pear, where, scarce, vary
ɑr ɑː START far, sharp, bark, carve, farm, heart
ɔr ɔː NORTH for, war, short, scorch, born, warm
or ɔː FORCE four, wore, sport, porch, borne, story
ʊr ʊə CURE poor, tourist, pure, plural
ə ə commA vodka, panda, saga, sofa, visa

characterized by prosodic (suprasegmental) features, which function over longer

stretches of speech than phonemes. These include not only stress, rhythm and into-
nation, but also syllabic and phonotactic structure, that is, the specific sequences of
sounds that occur in a language.
The most important phonotactic difference among accents of English has, in fact,
already been described in connection with the account of typologies, namely the
distribution of /r/. Another issue has to do with sequences (clusters) of consonants.
In most accents of English, a word or syllable may be initiated by a sequence of three
adjacent consonants, but only if the first of these is /s/. A great variety of combina-
tions is found in initial two-consonant clusters, yet all possible combinations are not
exploited. The historical initial cluster /kn/ in words such as knee, knock was lost in
the south of England in the late seventeenth century, but could until fairly recently
still be heard in varieties of Scots, as in Shetland dialect, where knee was pronounced
as [kniː]. Today, however, a more likely Shetland pronunciation is [kəˈniː], exemplify-
ing a common strategy in pronouncing unusual and problematic clusters: the cluster
is avoided through the insertion of a so-called epenthetic vowel. A well-known
historical example of this is the name Canute, the English version of the Scandinavian
name Knut.
20 Variation in English

Epenthetic vowels of this kind are also common in other accents of English, espe-
cially second-language and foreign-language varieties, to handle consonant clusters not
found in the speaker’s first language: sakool for ‘school’ as pronounced by Punjabi speak-
ers (McArthur 1992:376), sukuru direba for ‘screw driver’ by Hausa speakers in Africa
(Wells 1982:641) and [suturaɪku] for ‘strike’ by Japanese speakers. Medial and final clus-
ters may also be avoided by epenthesis, as in Hausa silik for ‘silk’ and crisipusi for ‘crisps’
(produced by EFL speakers from various countries); this strategy is also well-known
from ‘inner-circle’ varieties, for example, Irish English [ˈfɪləm] for ‘film’, [ˈd ʌbəlɪn] for
‘Dublin’. Epenthesis is not the only strategy used in avoiding consonant clusters, how-
ever. Reduction (deletion) is often found in initial as well as final clusters, as in [kratʃ ],
[traŋ ], [tʃaɪl] for ‘scratch’, ‘strong’, ‘child’ recorded in Jamaican Creole (cf. Section 4.11);
this is also a characteristic of varieties of African English and of African American
Vernacular English (AAVE).
Prosodic features of speech no doubt play an important part in the recognition of
individual speakers as well as accents, for example, rising tones in statements produced
by Northern Irish English speakers, the Welsh ‘lilt’ and the characteristic rhythm per-
ceived in Indian English. Regrettably, a coherent account or typology based on stress,
rhythm and intonation is not yet available (but cf. Grabe (2004) for information on a
British typology project). The following should therefore be seen as an unpretentious
listing of a few prosodic features that in our experience appear to be salient.
A characteristic of Received Pronunciation is the very marked difference between
stressed and unstressed syllables, in particular with regard to vowel quality; unstressed
syllables are generally reduced to [ ə ] as in [kənˈsɪdə ] for ‘consider’, [ˈɪnvəntəri] for ‘inven-
tory’ (according to Wells [2008], italicized schwa indicates that the vowel may be left
out altogether). Whereas unstressed Latin prefixes are largely realized in the same way
in General American, medial syllables are not: the American variant of inventory is given
in Wells 2008 as [ˈɪnvəntɔːri]. On the other hand, certain accents in the north of England
are characterized by a different rhythmical pattern, giving much more prominence to
prefixes. Instrumental analysis of realizations of the word consider by RP and Yorkshire
speakers showed that the first vowel was more than twice as long in the Yorkshire
recordings (Melchers 1972:57).
Conversely, some accents of English surpass RP in having extremely marked stresses
to the degree of near-exclusion of unstressed syllables. This is amusingly illustrated in
The Jimmy Carter Dictionary (Maloney 1977), a popularly written handbook to facilitate
the understanding of the president’s southern accent, where Urp indicates his way of
pronouncing Europe, and Prezdet indicates his title.
Most accents of English as a first language are generally described as stress-timed,
i.e., ‘a general rule of English rhythm is that we take an equal amount of time from
one stressed syllable to the next’ (Cruttenden 1997:20), whereas Asian and African
varieties are said to be syllable-timed, which means that an equal amount of time is
taken over each syllable; it follows that much less use is made of reduced syllables (cf.
Section 5.2.2.2). Accents of English also vary a great deal with respect to word stress,
both in groups of lexical items, for example, words having the suffix -ize, and lexical-
distributionally (see Section 3.1.2).
There is, of course, also variation in intonation patterns (cf. Grabe 2004 as quoted
earlier). Cruttenden (1997:133, 136) states that the most noticeable variation within
British English is the extensive use of rising tones in many northern cities; nowhere in
 Variation in English 21

the English-speaking world is the difference in tonal inventory as great as that between
RP and Belfast or Liverpool. In addition to the rising tones used routinely in cer-
tain regional accents, a particular type of rising statement intonation is increasingly
used in what are traditionally falling-tone accents. This phenomenon, known as HRT
(high rise terminal), was first observed in young people’s speech in New Zealand and
Australia in the 1960s, but is found in many other English-speaking countries, such as
the United States, Canada and the UK. Some further information about its possible
origin and its social and conversational functions is given in Section 4.8.3.2.
Finally, a few words should be said about voice quality. This refers to the over-
all characteristics of speech, including pitch and loudness ranges, which are not only
individually but also socially and regionally determined, and clearly function as sali-
ent features. Voice quality tends to be described in rather vague terms, such as ‘harsh’
or ‘loud’. Laver (1980), however, provided a systematic framework for description, on
which Wells (1982:92ff.) bases his claims that a high and wide pitch range is associated
with AAVE, whereas a Texan tends to have a low pitch range and a Scottish Highlands
accent is characterized by generally low volume. A sociophonetic study identified a
specifically working-class Glaswegian voice quality and found that it was justified to
talk about a special ‘Glasgow voice’, since all the speakers in the investigation shared a
particular constellation of articulatory settings (Stuart-Smith 1999:215).

3.2.3 Grammar
Morphological and syntactic variation – at least among standard varieties of English –
is not as striking as phonological variation, nor has it been as thoroughly studied
and described. After presenting their typology of English accents (cf. Section 3.2.2),
Trudgill and Hannah (1994:6) write, ‘Lexically and grammatically, the split between
the “English” and “American” types is somewhat neater, with USEng and CanEng
being opposed on most counts to the rest of the English-speaking world’.
As the following section in this chapter will indicate, and the accounts of ‘inner-
circle’ varieties in Chapter 4 will further corroborate, this is indeed very true as regards
the lexicon. Considering morphology and syntax, Trudgill and Hannah are also right,
yet the differences are few and can often be described as tendencies rather than absolute
distinctions. In addition, English English is presently undergoing certain changes that
may be attributed to the influence of American English: the use of hopefully as a sentence
adverbial (Hopefully, you will find this chapter useful), the use of do-support in constructions
such as Do you have any money? and the increasing use of ‘bare’ infinitival complements
after help, as in My mum used to help cook the meals for the children instead of help to cook (cf.
Cramley 2001:79). On the other hand, according to Trudgill (1998b:32), there is also
some indication that grammatical innovations may be spreading from Britain to the
United States, for example, the use of do in sentences such as I don’t know if I’m going to
the party tonight, but I might do.
There exists as yet no neat, comprehensive typology of grammatical variation in World
Englishes, although the recent large-scale Mouton handbooks (Kortmann and Upton
2008, Kortmann et al. 2008) constitute an important step forward. However, attempts
have been made at describing worldwide variation in certain salient features such as tag
questions (Crystal 1995:299), which may be variant as in You didn’t see him, did you?
or invariant as in You didn’t see him, is it? (cf. Cramley 2001:161ff. and Sections 4.2.3.2
22 Variation in English

and 5.2.3 in this book). Other syntactic and morphological features that are clearly vari-
able and would lend themselves particularly well to typological descriptions are:

•• concord with collective nouns (for example, the government/audience is/are: the plural
is used much less frequently in American English than in British English; Australian
English has a pattern of its own and so on);
•• tense and aspect (the past and perfect tenses, for example, tend to be used differ-
ently, as in American English Did you call her yet? corresponding to British English
Have you called her yet? (cf. also the Irish English example quoted in Section 3.1.2);
in a number of varieties around the world the progressive form is used with stative
verbs, as in Irish English This is belonging to me);
•• the use of auxiliaries (variation in the use of shall and should with first-person sub-
jects, the development of new auxiliaries such as gotta in certain varieties; cf. also
the changing use of do-support described earlier);
•• pronominal usage (there are, for example, two distinct second-person pronouns in
some varieties of English, signalling different degrees of formality such as sg. you
vs pl. yous(e) in Irish English, also found in some American and Australian English
[again, consider the example quoted in Section 3.1.2]);
•• irregular verb forms (e.g. the well-known ‘American’ past tenses dove instead of
dived and snuck instead of sneaked; in non-standard varieties, variation is particularly
striking).

3.2.4 Lexis
3.2.4.1 Register and variety: terminology
The English of a chemistry textbook and that of a recipe or medical advice column
share many common words. But there are obvious differences between the vocabu-
laries of the two texts, and these are part of what is called differences in register.
Some words (technical terms) occur only in one register. Some words occur in both,
but have rather different meanings in the textbook and in the recipe, like aromatic or
salt. For example, salt means any product of an acid and an alkali in the chemistry
register, but in the recipe register it refers to an ingredient consisting mainly of one
particular chemical salt – sodium chloride. We can say that salt is polysemous – it
has two different but related meanings. A similar phenomenon is illustrated by the
form mole which refers to a type of quantity in chemistry, but in general contexts to an
underground animal, a sea-defence wall or a mark on the face. These four unrelated
meanings illustrate what is called homonymy. Sometimes there are two or more
terms which refer to more or less the same thing, for example, recipe salt and chemical
sodium chloride, or face-mark mole and beauty spot. The two words that roughly refer to
the same thing are called synonyms.
The regional varieties of English behave like topic-based registers in that they have
some words unique to the region (which we will call localisms), some words that have
different meanings in different regions (polysemous or homonymous words), and some
different words for similar things in different regions (synonymous words). All varieties
of English share the overwhelming majority of their abstract and generalized vocabu-
lary, because it derives from a common body of knowledge and a common set of texts.
 Variation in English 23

Another type of difference is on the boundary of lexis and syntax. General English
words have different frequencies and different collocational properties in texts from dif-
ferent regions. This emerges from computer-based studies of large corpora (singular
corpus) of English from different geographical areas, which have been designed to be
comparable with one another such as the ICE (International Corpus of English: http://
ice-corpora.net/ice/). Thus, for example, Edwards and Laporte (2015) looked at the use
of into in the ICE corpora for British, American, Hong Kong, Indian, and Singaporean
English and a comparable corpus of Dutch English. In this case, it was found that the
least established varieties (Dutch and Hong Kong) were those that were most remote
from the most established (British, American and Singaporean).

3.2.4.2 Lexis and variety

Lexis is less easy to assign to varieties than phonology and syntax. Consider words for
strips of fried potato, crisp outside, soft inside. It is sometimes said that these are called
chips in Britain and French fries in the United States. This implies that chips and French fries
are cross-variety synonyms (sometimes called heteronyms). Several complications arise.
One is that fish and chips is on sale in the United States and restaurants with an American
ambience in the UK sell French fries. Thus, the terms are known and used outside their
geographical homes. Another complication is that British chips are typically thicker than
French fries, but thinner than another US type of fried potatoes: steak fries. So, these terms
are not exact synonyms, as indeed so-called synonyms are usually not. A third compli-
cation is what the dish is called in all the other varieties of English: in many of them,
both chips and (French) fries are current.
Chips is polysemous, that is, it has several different but related meanings. Some of
these meanings are regionally different (sometimes called tautonyms). In the United
States, (potato) chip refers to thin hard-fried slices of potato (or of something else). There
is a British synonym in crisp and a South Asian one in wafer, but British crisp packets may
be labelled ‘chips’, and in India, wafers, crisps and chips all seem to be current.
Similarly, there are more or less synonymous terms for a tunnel for pedestrians under a
road, which is often called a subway in Britain, but is generally an underpass in the United
States. In India, however, a newspaper article may use subway in the headline and under-
pass in the text: the terms are synonymous within the regional variety. Of course, sub-
way is polysemous across varieties, normally referring to an underground railway in the
United States. The brand-name of the well-known sandwich chain Subway may be the
most familiar use in the expanding circle, but it is based on a pun on submarine, the local US
term for a baguette sandwich and this point is doubtless lost on most Subway customers,
who relate directly to the US meaning ‘underground railway’, which is probably the best-
known meaning in the expanding circle. Given the unglamorous nature of underpasses,
even British English speakers probably make a connection to the New York subway as well.
These complications are partly a consequence of the psycholinguistic fact that, while
knowledge of syntax or phonology is implicit, vocabulary knowledge is explicit and
under our conscious control. We can explain to a foreigner what words mean in our
language, but we cannot reliably explain the pronunciation or syntax without special
training. This means that it is easy to adopt new words and adapt our vocabulary to
our conversational partner. As a consequence, it is easy for words that differentiate two
varieties, such as British and American, to be used as synonyms in a third.
24 Variation in English

Another problem with characterizing the vocabulary of varieties is words like kanga-
roo. Is kangaroo Australian English? Anyone discussing marsupials in any variety must use
kangaroo. On the other hand, the word is probably more frequent in Australian English.
In this respect, the vocabularies of the geographical varieties are like those of specialist
registers. The register of microbiology, for example, includes typically ‘microbiologi-
cal’ words like vacuole, words that have a somewhat wider circulation in more everyday
registers like mitochondrial and words or expressions that have become part of the core
vocabulary like DNA.

3.2.4.3 Types of lexical difference and similarity

When considering content words (i.e., not function words like prepositions and pro-
nouns) that seem to be most often used in a certain geographical area (Deverson
2000:33), we can use two dimensions to classify them: variation of form and variation
of meaning. Six categories can be distinguished and they are summed up in Table 3.2.
The simplest case is where both form and meaning are unique to a particular variety
(or, one might say, to the register of a particular region). Here we have localisms like
Nigerian FOOFOO1 ‘pounded yam’, British bonfire night (a festival on 5 November) or
the Indian English borrowing dalit (‘low-caste person’). We choose the keyword, on the
assumption that it refers to a particular Nigerian phenomenon which is mainly known
and discussed in Nigerian communities. Further examples would be interdining ‘eating
with members of a different caste’, probably only known to speakers of Indian English
and presupposing Indian culture. The US term submarine sandwich, and China English
iron rice bowl are yet further examples.
The other category of localisms is called CRORE. In FOOFOO cases the meaning
is local, but here a variety has a word for (‘a lexicalization of ’) a concept that exists in
other varieties without a natural word for it. Examples would be South Asian CRORE
‘ten million, mainly for money sums’, British, Australian, etc. fortnight ‘two weeks’ and

Table 3.2 Types of lexical variation

Type Concept is purely local With this meaning, the Form has another Concept is referred
form is mainly used in meaning in other to by another form
a particular region or varieties in other varieties
variety

Localism
FOOFOO + + − −
CRORE − + − −
Local but widely and unambiguously used in General English
KANGAROO + known worldwide but − − −
Cross-variety synonymy
THUMB TACK − + − +
Cross-variety polysemy/homonymy
ROBIN +/− + + −
Both synonymy and homonymy/polysemy
CHIPS +/− + + +
 Variation in English 25

stone ‘fourteen pounds, as a measure of weight of humans’ and the Yorkshire lake ‘play
as a leisure time activity’ (as opposed to play as in ‘play a game’).
Although kangaroo refers to an Australian animal, it is the name of this animal in
every variety of English, and hence is hardly characteristic of Australian English. We
call such words KANGAROO. The extent to which the word is known outside its
‘home’ depends on how widely the institution, fauna, etc. is known. If the referent
is widespread or becomes well-known, the foreignism becomes simply the General
English name for a non-universal item or concept, like rambutan (tropical fruit), obeche
(tropical hardwood), sarong (South-east Asian garment), apartheid (the former race sys-
tem in South Africa) or sharia (Islamic law). The line between FOOFOO words and
KANGAROO ones is indeterminate, but important in discussing varieties like China
English (see Section 6.4.2).
General English or its anthropological register often has names for phenomena and
institutions outside the geographical regions and cultural domains where being mono-
lingual in English is the norm. Thus, the English of anthropology includes terms like
bride price (gifts are given to the bride’s family on marriage, rather than the groom’s, as
with a traditional European or Indian dowry) and cross-cousin (one’s mother’s brother’s,
or father’s sister’s, child of the opposite sex to oneself ) which refer to non-European
institutions or categories. Several writers on different African Englishes cite bride price
as a localism, but it would be more appropriate to regard it as a General English term
referring to a phenomenon frequent in that range, a KANGAROO word. The phrase
is in the register of anthropology where the custom does not exist, but in general use
where it does.
Words with different forms can refer to the same concept in different regions, that is,
be synonymous across regions like US THUMB TACK, British drawing pin. It is easy
to find online lists of paired words ‘for the same thing’ from different varieties, and we
use THUMB TACK for such synonyms. Görlach (1995a) calls these ‘heteronyms’ and
illustrates them by the pair garbage and rubbish which mean roughly the same and are
used in different varieties. Actually, as we noted, perfect synonymy is rather unusual.
US thumb tack covers a wider range of pin types than British (etc.) drawing pin, and some
types of pin are called thumb tack in both registers. Even if a country cottage in Britain, a
dacha in Russia and a bach in New Zealand are all second homes in the country used at
weekends, they inevitably refer to different types of building with different associations
and even functions. Where the referent is an animal or manufactured object synonymy
may be better. For example, the concept ‘flea’ is represented by flea in General English,
but by lop in traditional Yorkshire speech. Terms for paper bags for shopping vary across
dialects in the United States: what is a paper sack in some places is a paper bag in others.
New technology does not throw up synonyms to the same extent as railways, roads,
motor cars, etc. did. However, US cellphone and urban legend vs British mobile phone and
urban myth are exceptions to this rule.
The same form can be used in two varieties with related but different meanings, that
is, be polysemous across regions in the sense that the form is used with different mean-
ings in different varieties (like ROBIN referring to different birds in different areas). A
form can also be homonymous, as in the case of US fag ‘homosexual’, British fag ‘ciga-
rette’ with unrelated different meanings. Sometimes polysemous words like this have
one or several meanings which can be regarded as General English (GE). ROBIN words
unambiguously refer to different (local) things in different varieties, and to nothing
26 Variation in English

else in that variety. These are not particularly common, and many examples seem to be
transfers of species names. Robin is polysemous in that North American robin refers only
to a local species, but British robin refers to a different species. A further example is bun-
galow, which means ‘single-storey house’ in Britain, but ‘detached villa’ in East Africa
and elsewhere, but it does not mean anything else in either location.
Words like bar show a rather common type of polysemy or homonymy in which
one meaning of a form is shared among varieties while another is exclusively local.
The word has a number of General English meanings as in iron bar, drink in a bar and an
additional specific meaning within British-style legal systems. The word mad primarily
means ‘crazy’ in Britain, but ‘angry’ in the United States, though constructions like mad
at me and madly in love are, of course, unambiguous, so the other meaning is accessible.
Again, the form in one variety may be a lexicalization of a concept that exists in other
varieties without a natural word for it. Thus, backbencher is polysemous between the
general meaning ‘parliamentarian without a ministerial post’ which is also used in South
Asia, and the South Asian meaning ‘lazy schoolchild’. A trailer for the 2018 film The
Backbencher about an unsuccessful schoolboy can be seen on YouTube: www.youtube.
com/watch?v=BMbbOY5gi2k (Patel 2018). Another example is mob, which can mean
an unruly crowd of people anywhere, but also a flock of sheep or herd of cows, in New
Zealand. Polysemous words are called tautonyms by Görlach (1995a).
Finally, words can, of course, be both polysemous and synonymous with other words
across regional registers. This we have already seen, along with the problems involved
in claiming synonymy, with CHIPS above, given that chips has a variety of General
English meanings alongside the region-specific ones. We also saw that subway is both
synonymous with underpass and polysemous, with the meanings ‘underground railway’
and ‘tunnel under a road’. Pavement is polysemous in that it means ‘sidewalk’ in Britain,
but ‘road surface’ in the United States and has a synonym in that British pavement and
US sidewalk mean the same thing. Examples also arise with animal names. In British and
Scandinavian English elk is synonymous with moose, but in the United States it refers to a
different type of deer, known in Britain as red deer. Consequently, elk has a cross-variety
synonym in red deer and is itself polysemous across varieties. Görlach (1995a) points out
that when a variety adopts a synonym from another, it can replace the original form, as
radio has basically replaced wireless, or it can become a synonym within the new variety,
as garbage and rubbish seem to have done in many varieties, or the two words can become
specialized. British English has adopted formerly US can for drinks (a can of beer/coke)
and metaphorical uses (canned music) but kept tin for other products (a tin of beans/meat).

3.2.4.4 Processes of lexical differentiation

Very often, the process which has led to differences in vocabulary between varieties is
intralingual: it can be explained by reference only to English. One source of different
lexis in present-day varieties or local registers is separate inheritance. Two variants may
have existed in the norm at the time when the varieties separated and the two varie-
ties may have happened to adopt different ones as the unmarked word. This is said to
be the origin of such THUMBTACK pairs as British autumn and US fall, for example.
Similarly, both railroad and railway, sidewalk and pavement were in use in Britain in the
nineteenth century and railroad and sidewalk have happened to become the norm in the
United States as against railway and pavement in Britain.
 Variation in English 27

The second source of difference in lexis is word-formation in one or both varieties.

There are many different word-formation processes. Perhaps the most common is the
simple application of an old word to a new concept, often leading to ROBIN polysemy.
Thus, a hawker in Singapore and Malaysia is someone who keeps a stall in the market,
while a British hawker goes from door to door selling his or her wares (see Section
5.2.4). A particular variant of this is conversion: shift of word class, as in West African
to off – ‘to switch off ’.
A new word may be formed by compounding or giving a specialized meaning to
a combination of English words. West Africans have produced the FOOFOO localism
chewing stick for the stick with a chewed end that is used for tooth-cleaning.
Another intralingual process is affixation, where a new word is created by adding
affixes to an old one. When cars acquired noise-reduction devices, the suffix -er was
used in Britain to create silencer and in the United States to create muffler, producing a
THUMBTACK pair of synonyms. In West Africa, a chief sits on a stool just as a king
sits on a throne, so the FOOFOO localisms destool and enstoolment, have been derived
by analogy with dethrone, enthronement. In Australian English, the suffixes -ie and -o are
particularly productive (roughie for ‘outsider in a horse race’, arvo ‘afternoon’, smoko ‘a
break for smoking’).
Interlingual sources of lexical difference involve borrowing. The early US settlers,
meeting Cucurbita pepo, borrowed Narragansett Indian asquutasquash and shortened it
to squash. Many FOOFOO localisms are produced by borrowing to deal with new
phenomena in newly settled areas – koala, billabong in Australia – and to refer to local
institutions where English is a second language – Dalit ‘caste name’, namaskar ‘type of
prayer’ in India.
There are various degrees of borrowing, which can be illustrated within the
THUMBTACK set of synonyms for Curbita vegetables: squash exemplifies radical
reforming to suit the borrowing language, whereas the borrowings for ‘small/young
Cucurbita fruit’ – British courgette from French and US zucchini from Italian – retain
more of their source-language form. Borrowed forms are often combined with native
ones to make hybrids by affixation like the Indian English CRORE word desiness
‘Indian-ness’, by compounding like IndE khadi-clad from khadi ‘cotton cloth’ + clad or
by blending like tevariffic from tevar ‘attitude’ + terrific (Kathpalia 2018). The elements
of source language compounds or idioms can be translated literally to produce a loan-
translation or calque like West African long legs ‘influence in high places’. One mean-
ing of the word pull is probably roughly synonymous with long-legs, so the calque can be
regarded as exemplifying THUMBTACK.

3.2.5 Pragmatics
Pragmatics is concerned with language in use: how we use language in particular cir-
cumstances to achieve particular ends. It is concerned with appropriacy rather than cor-
rectness. Some aspects of pragmatic difference are linguistic, in that a different form is
used for a similar purpose across varieties.
Thus, it is a common feature of many varieties of English that terms of endearment
are used to establish solidarity between strangers in certain circumstances. Assistants in
small shops often address customers as dear or an equivalent. But there are strict prag-
matic rules for who can address who in these terms and varieties differ in the terms
28 Variation in English

used. In Britain, terms of endearment can be used from men to women, and vice versa,
and among women. In London, dear and darling are heard, all over the North love, in
Newcastle pet and dear, and in Devon one can hear my lover. In small towns in the United
States, one might hear honey, and in Louisiana cher.
However, pragmatic differences are cultural or social as well as linguistic. From a
male taxi-driver to a male customer in Britain, mate would establish solidarity, sir would
establish social distance with respect and squire would establish social distance without
showing respect. In Australia, mate might be the only possibility. In the United States,
man might be equivalent to mate and sir might be similar in implication to its British
equivalent, but there would be no equivalent to squire. Different societies call for differ-
ent systems of address and different types of politeness and provide different occasions
when it necessary to say something.

3.2.6 A note on the linguistic variable

It goes without saying that our descriptions of individual varieties of English given in
the two following chapters will not cover complete grammars or sound systems, let
alone vocabularies. For one thing, our scope is limited, but more importantly, it would
make the presentation very repetitious and tedious. It follows that we have tried to focus
on characteristic features, highlighting the differences between the main varieties, but
also social/regional variation within these varieties.
The term linguistic variable, which was originally developed by William Labov (1972)
in his pioneering sociolinguistic studies, refers to a feature in which variation has been
observed to occur, where that variation can be related to social variables or to other
linguistic variables. The feature could be taken from any of the five categories described
in this section, but so far most studies have been devoted to phonology and grammar.
Some well-known examples of socially/regionally significant linguistic variables – at
least in part of the English-speaking world – are rhoticity, present-tense verb endings
and the realization of -ing. The spelling < -in> for < -ing> is widely used in conversa-
tional writing to symbolize informality.

3.3 Variation in historical origin and evolution

Chapter 2 provided an outline of the expansion of English throughout the world, distin-
guishing between English as a Native Language (ENL), English as a Second Language
(ESL), English as a Foreign Language (EFL) and English as a Lingua Franca (ELF) vari-
eties and accounting for Kachru’s much-quoted ‘three-circle’ model, which has largely
supplied the organization of this book. As the representation of the model itself with
its overlapping circles suggests, it cannot provide a watertight typology; a case in point
is the fuzzy distinction between outer- and expanding-circle varieties. It has also been
difficult to accommodate the so-called ‘new Englishes’ into the model, considering
their very different origins and histories.
A more sophisticated model with particular reference to the character and develop-
ment of postcolonial varieties has more recently been put forward by Schneider (2007).
This ‘dynamic model’, identifying a fundamentally uniform evolutionary process, has
been widely accepted and found to apply to most varieties, including inner-circle ones.
The following is a brief summary of its content and implications.
 Variation in English 29

Five stages can be identified in the evolution of World Englishes: ‘foundation’, ‘exonor-
mative stabilisation’, ‘nativisation’, ‘endonormative stabilisation’ and ‘differentiation’.

1 ‘foundation’ simply implies that English is introduced to a new territory by settlers.

The foundation stage may operate over an extended period of time. Language
contact plays an important role here, between English and indigenous languages
as well as between different dialects of English as spoken by the settlers, but bor-
rowings tend to be chiefly lexical, relating to local terms and places (compare, for
example, Aboriginal names in Australia). Identity construction is also character-
istic of this phase, that is, on the part of the English-speaking settlers, as well as
‘the others’;
2 ‘exonormative stabilisation’ occurs when there is a stable colonial situation and the
mother country, for example, Britain, sets the linguistic norms, which may result
in ‘elite bilingualism’ among members of the indigenous population. Knowledge of
English is seen as an asset. Borrowing is chiefly lexical at this stage as well;
3 ‘nativisation’ means that ties and allegiance to the mother country are weakening
and a new identity is accepted by the settlers. This has major linguistic conse-
quences: the indigenous population tends to stabilize a second-language system that
is a kind of synthesis of substrate effects, language-learning processes and features
adopted from the settlers’ English. A ‘complaint tradition’ develops, with teachers
and others expressing disapproval towards the local forms of English (compare for
example Section 4.8.2 on perceptions of New Zealand English);
4 ‘endonormative stabilisation’ is when local norms are gradually accepted and there
is a growing national identity embraced by settlers and the indigenous population
alike. This is, among other things, evidenced by the codification of the local variety
in publications of national dictionaries and the increase in local fictional writing;
5 ‘differentiation’, finally, implies that the new nation begins to view itself ‘in its
own right’. It is seen as a composite of regional, social and ethnic groups and increas-
ing dialectal differences may arise.

The presentation of World Englishes in Chapters 4–6 gives examples of these five stages,
although they are not necessarily spelled out.

3.4 Dimensions of classification
We have shown earlier that we can group samples of language by linguistic character-
istics: spelling, pronunciation, grammar, lexis and pragmatics. The groups of samples
with similar features in these areas would represent varieties like African American
Vernacular English (AAVE), Australian, Indian, Jamaican Creole, Nigerian, Singapore,
RP + Southern British, Northern United States.
These varieties differ in a number of ways other than their linguistic or code features,
and this section looks at ways of classifying varieties, their speakers or the countries in
which they are used (Gupta 1997). We try to provide coherent definitions of terms in
World English studies, making clear what is being classified: a language variety, a coun-
try or a speaker, for example, and what criteria are used for the classification: sociolin-
guistic, linguistic, psycholinguistic and so on. The reader will see that the same cake can
be cut up many different ways for different purposes.
Another random document with
no related content on Scribd:
cette miséricordieuse servante des pauvres ? Il faut que vous la
lisiez.
Pauline rentra, l’âme rafraîchie d’une paix où elle sentit l’avant-
goût de plus parfaites délices ; de cette heure, sa conversion devint
une chose vraiment décidée.
Toutefois, s’il avait fallu pour la conduire au premier seuil de la
vie surnaturelle, une année de tourments, la mort de Julien, et les
inestimables supplications d’âmes qu’elle ignorait, il lui restait plus
d’un doute à résoudre et d’un dégoût à vaincre.
Jusqu’alors elle avait jugé le monde « bien pensant » d’après les
Rude et son oncle. Aussi le croyait-elle supérieur à celui dont elle
était. Mais Armance lui apprit sur des gens du voisinage, réputés
dévots, quelques anecdotes qui l’indignèrent.
Il y avait au bout de la rue, dans une maison décrépite qu’elle
louait presque en entier, une vieille fille riche et sordide, Mlle Crépin.
Pauline la voyait passer tous les matins, allant à la messe de sept
heures, ratatinée sous une pèlerine noire, coiffée d’une capote de
forme archaïque, et marchant en zigzag, comme si elle cherchait,
entre les fentes des pavés, des louis d’or perdus. Mlle Crépin, qui
passait pour millionnaire, accroissait ses revenus par des
spéculations habilement conseillées ; elle participait à la fureur
d’agiotage dont était possédée cette petite ville de rentiers oisifs ; et
l’on racontait qu’en un seul mois la hausse des cuivres lui avait valu
trente mille francs de gain. Elle se mêlait d’œuvres charitables, mais
appliquait au bien des pauvres les principes qu’elle suivait pour le
sien propre ; elle plaçait l’argent recueilli à leur intention, et, même si
elle les savait dans les plus affreuses nécessités, elle les rationnait
en aumônes, ne laissait fuir de « leur capital » que des bribes
dérisoires.
« Lorsqu’on n’a pas, on sait se priver », tel était un de ses
axiomes ; elle revenait souvent du marché avec trois navets dans
son cabas en se lamentant de ce que « la vie devenait impossible » ;
elle passait l’hiver sans feu, se chauffait les mains sur le couveau où
cuisait son potage. Quand elle n’était pas à l’église, elle comptait ses
coupons ou s’occupait de faire rentrer ses loyers ; et, une fois, en
grimpant à une soupente pour sommer d’en déguerpir le locataire
qui l’habitait, elle avait failli se rompre le cou.
Quoique Pauline connût son renom, l’idée audacieuse lui vint de
sonner à sa porte et de mendier une contribution au secours que les
Rouleau attendaient.
« Étant notre voisine, peut-être n’osera-t-elle pas me refuser ; et,
si elle me reçoit mal, j’embourserai l’affront pour les pauvres. »
Un dimanche donc, après vêpres, elle se présenta chez cette
personne de dévotion. Mlle Crépin entre-bâilla son huis, laissa voir
son menton aigu, son nez sec chaussé de lunettes, ses yeux
clignotants. Dès que Pauline se nomma, elle prit un air froid et
cérémonieux : elle l’introduisit dans la salle à manger où des images
pieuses ornaient les murs, et la pria de s’asseoir, sans insister. Mais,
aux premiers mots que Pauline prononça sur les Rouleau, la vieille
demoiselle se redressa dans sa petite taille ; ses lèvres, minces
comme un fil, se pincèrent.
— On m’a déjà parlé de cette famille, dit-elle d’un ton rogue ; ce
ne sont pas des gens intéressants ; l’homme et la femme ont vécu
ensemble non mariés.
— Je crois être sûre, répliqua Pauline, qu’ils sont mariés à l’heure
actuelle.
— Oui, je le sais, le ménage est régularisé — ce mot, dans une
bouche soi-disant chrétienne, sonnait déplaisamment — ; mais nous
n’avons pas cru devoir les mettre sur nos listes. Avec les ressources
modestes dont nous disposons, il nous faut imiter les vierges sages
qui gardèrent l’huile de leur lampe… Ne pouvez-vous pas vous
adresser au bureau de bienfaisance ? Ces messieurs vous
accueilleront.
Sa façon d’articuler : « ces messieurs », s’accompagna d’un coup
d’œil qui voulait dire : « Ils sont de votre bord ; nous, foin de vos
gens ! »
— Mademoiselle, conclut Pauline en faisant deux pas vers le
seuil, je suis venue à vous, parce qu’il s’agit d’une détresse urgente.
Vous m’opposez la prudence des vierges sages ; permettez-moi de
vous rappeler l’imprudence du bon Samaritain qui n’attendit pas,
pour verser de l’huile dans les plaies du moribond, de savoir sur
quelles listes il était.
Elle salua, et partit révoltée, moins de sa ladrerie que des motifs
dont elle croyait la couvrir. Comment ! cette hypocrite pharisienne
était considérée par les prêtres, admise à communier, et on
respectait en elle une des clefs de voûte de la paroisse ! Les
diatribes de son père contre la platitude cléricale lui remontaient aux
lèvres, et, comme Victorien, elle généralisait jusqu’à l’injustice :
« Est-ce l’Église vraie du Christ qui engraisse en ses pâturages
de pareilles brebis ? Cueille-t-on des raisins sur des épines et des
figues sur des ronces ? »
Le lundi, jour de marché, en sortant de bonne heure avec
Armance, elle traversa la place de la cathédrale où les merciers
tendaient leurs bannes.
— Mademoiselle, demanda la servante, veut-elle que j’entre à
l’église pour dire un bout de prière ?
— Oui ; je vous accompagne.
Une messe, à l’autel de la sainte Vierge, justement commençait ;
Pauline s’était initiée à l’ordonnance et aux phases du sacrifice ; elle
s’agenouilla dans une pensée de vénération émue, se remémorant
la parole : « Chaque fois que vous ferez cette chose, vous
annoncerez la mort du Sauveur » ; et, sans croire d’une foi pleine à
la Présence réelle, son esprit suivait attentivement la succession des
rites.
Mais le prêtre qui célébrait briffa l’Introït, la Collecte et l’Évangile
avec une vélocité qui la déconcerta.
« Dit-il sa messe pour lui seul ou pour les fidèles qui sont là ? »
Il mettait en ses génuflexions une nonchalance d’habitude
presque irrévérencieuse ; pendant le Canon, il traçait des signes de
croix sur la patène, éleva l’hostie, puis le calice, ôtait et remettait la
pale, tournait les feuillets du missel, se frappait la poitrine, communia
comme pressé d’en finir, et, en quinze minutes, la messe fut
expédiée. Pauline eut une déception, un froid lui tomba sur le cœur :
pour l’homme qui venait de réitérer la Cène, rien ne vivait donc sous
les mots et les gestes où il s’identifiait pourtant à Jésus-Christ ?
L’accoutumance émoussait-elle à ce point la ferveur ? Et alors, était-
ce la peine de pratiquer un culte dont les liturgies, à la longue, se
vidaient de toute émotion ?
Lorsqu’elle revit, le samedi d’après, l’abbé Charmoy, elle ne lui
dissimula rien de ses désenchantements. Il parut contrarié, mais en
prit occasion pour l’éclairer sur ses faiblesses qu’il pénétrait.
— Vous êtes trop impressionnable, la blâma-t-il tranquillement.
En principe, ce n’est point tout à fait un mal ; si vous sentiez peu,
vous vous seriez endurcie dans l’abstraction, et je ne connais guère
d’état plus triste, plus irrémissible. Il faut, néanmoins, apprendre à
gouverner vos sentiments, vous faire, comme disent les Provençaux,
une tête bien cerclée. Quand vous rencontrerez de mauvais
chrétiens, des prêtres négligents… ou même scandaleux, ne vous
pressez pas de conclure que l’Église, dont ils sont, est coupable de
leur indignité. D’abord, nous sommes plus tentés que les autres,
c’est incontestable. Interrogez votre jeune expérience ; vous aviez
plus de sécurité, de fausse sécurité, avant le jour où le premier appel
d’En Haut vous troubla. On ne mérite pas la grâce sans souffrance,
et il est si commode de s’engourdir, au lieu de s’évertuer ! Le démon
de la paresse glisse dans nos veines à notre insu ; nos plus belles
résolutions font souvent comme ces petits ermitages que sainte
Thérèse, enfant, bâtissait en posant les unes sur les autres des
pierres qui tombaient presque aussitôt. Cet abbé, dont la messe
vous afflige, il ne se doute pas, je crois, de son inconvenance. Il
oublie qu’on nous juge sévèrement, plus sévèrement que d’autres,
et avec raison parce que jamais la médiocrité, en nous, n’est licite.
Mais, vous, soyez plus humble ; chaque fois que l’esprit de critique
vous tourmente, même si vos griefs sont justes, appliquez-vous à
trouver dans l’œil du voisin une paille et, dans le vôtre, une poutre.
Pauline n’acceptait pas, sans résister, le langage de l’abbé
Charmoy ; elle en recevait pourtant la notion précieuse de
l’indulgence catholique et acquérait, à son contact, ce discernement
des « valeurs » que la raison indépendante oblitère, neuf fois sur dix,
par un manque d’équilibre. Le bon sens du prêtre n’était pas
simplement le sien ; sa pensée filtrait dix-neuf siècles de certitude
expérimentale et de tradition.
Une circonstance inopinée devait bientôt faire sentir à Pauline
combien la vie de l’Église s’incorporait à sa vie.
L’oncle Hippolyte, en octobre, se mit au lit ; ce vieillard, jusque-là
ferme comme un roc, déclina soudain de telle sorte que sa fin parut
prochaine. Il garda quelques semaines encore l’illusion de se
remettre, et, le 1er novembre, le ciel étant clair, il dit à sa nièce :
— Un beau jour de Toussaint… Comme en 1840. Si je pouvais
sortir demain… Il faut que j’aille à la banque toucher de l’argent… Tu
me prépareras mes bottines et mon manteau…
Son grand souci restait de manger le plus possible ; une heure
après son repas, il soutenait qu’il n’avait pas dîné et qu’on voulait le
laisser mourir de faim. Cependant, la paralysie gagnait ses organes ;
il dormait parfois des journées entières, avec une respiration si faible
qu’il ne semblait plus devoir se réveiller. Ou bien des hallucinations
obsédaient son cerveau dont les artères s’atrophiaient. Il parlait seul,
d’une voix sourde et absorbée, dans un délire sans fièvre. Il se
croyait invité à des ripailles et répétait durant des heures les
mouvements d’un homme qui mâche ou qui boit.
— Je ne crois pas qu’il aille bien loin, fit un soir M. Ardel, peiné
de perdre son oncle et davantage de voir la mort assise sur le toit de
sa maison.
Une autre anxiété préoccupait Pauline : « Mon oncle va-t-il mourir
sans sacrements ? » L’importance involontaire que prenait pour elle
un acte religieux l’avertit à quel point la foi devenait « l’os de ses os
et la moelle de ses moelles ». Malgré tout, elle n’osait en parler au
malade et justifiait sa timidité par des motifs contestables :
« Mon oncle a eu, en somme, une conduite probe. S’il s’est
racorni dans des enfantillages d’égoïste et d’avare, il a cru faire son
devoir en gagnant bien sa vie. Il n’a jamais eu beaucoup d’idées, et,
même, les gens qui en ont, pour lui, sont « des fléaux ». Dieu lui
pardonnera, parce qu’il aura beaucoup ignoré. Il s’en va plein de
jours, après une vieillesse somnolente et calme. A vrai dire, il aura
toujours été un dormant ; son entrée dans l’autre monde sera la
réelle naissance d’une âme qui n’a pas vécu. Dois-je l’éveiller avant
la lumière ? »
Mais, un jour que son délire avait cessé, comme Pauline, pour
l’égayer, parlait de la belle saison où il redescendrait au jardin :
— La belle saison, fit-il, je ne la verrai pas. Je suis au bout de
mon rouleau.
— Puissions-nous vous garder longtemps encore ! répondit-elle,
entraînée par une décision subite. Seulement, à votre âge, mon
oncle, des surprises sont possibles. Verriez-vous sans déplaisir un
prêtre ?
Il pâlit à cette question, comme s’il eût entendu son arrêt ; car, au
fond, il espérait vivre, et se disait mourant, dans l’espoir qu’elle le
rassurerait contre ses angoisses. Il croyait Pauline une parfaite
païenne, plus païenne que lui qui conservait pour les principes de
son enfance un respect latent ; si elle lui proposait un prêtre, c’était
donc qu’elle le savait bien fini.
— Quand le moment sera venu, répondit-il après un silence…
Mais amène-m’en un vieux… qui me comprenne…
Huit jours plus tard, en buvant une tasse de lait, il s’aperçut qu’il
ne pouvait avaler ; les muscles de sa gorge se paralysaient.
— Maintenant, bégaya-t-il d’une langue déjà embarrassée ; fais
ce que tu m’as dit.
L’abbé Charmoy vint le voir, le confessa, et lui apporta, le
lendemain, l’Extrême-Onction ; vers le coucher du soleil, il entra en
agonie. Pauline retrouva, près de son oncle moribond, certaines des
impressions qui l’avaient accablée au chevet de Julien : un râle
sifflait dans la poitrine du vieillard ; sa tête, renversée en arrière,
oscillait de gauche à droite et de droite à gauche, ses mains se
crispaient sous le drap. Elle lut tout haut les prières qu’elle avait
entendu lire à l’abbé Jacques ; et il lui semblait qu’elle les lisait pour
Julien. A son âme radieuse convenait cette anticipation des
triomphes célestes :
« Que la multitude splendide des Anges accoure au-devant de
toi ; que le sénat des Apôtres juges vienne aussi, et l’armée, vêtue
de blanc, des Martyrs ; que la troupe rutilante des Confesseurs
t’environne, portant des lis ; que le chœur des Vierges te reçoive ;
que les Patriarches te serrent dans leur embrassement au sein
d’une bienheureuse quiétude ; que le visage de Jésus-Christ
t’apparaisse doux et te fasse fête… »
Qu’importait-il vraiment de traverser le couloir sinistre de la mort,
si, à l’issue, doivent se déployer les portes éternelles ?
Pauline discernait quelle lourde erreur aveuglait Victorien,
lorsqu’il induisait des passagères défaites de l’Église la faillite de sa
mission. « L’Église visible, se disait-elle, s’appuie sur l’invisible
assemblée des Saints ; nous n’apercevons de ce concile immense
que les rangs infimes, et n’entendons de ses voix qu’un écho
assourdi… »
Peu de jours après l’oncle Hippolyte, le vieil archevêque décéda.
Son successeur, Mgr Chênedru, fit, trois mois plus tard, son entrée
solennelle ; Pauline et Edmée voulurent assister à cette cérémonie.
Les bourdons l’annoncèrent de leur formidable mugissement. Au
ventre de la tour leurs volées s’élargirent, et les chocs des deux
battants retombaient ensemble, comme titubant d’ivresse. Un
Hosanna pontifical se propageait avec les cercles ondulatoires de
leurs vibrations sur les collines et la campagne que le soleil de Mars
ranimait.
A l’intérieur, bruissait un vaste peuple ; on sentait dans l’attente
de la foule sourdre une allégresse ; et les pierres des arceaux
s’égayaient sous les oriflammes appendues. Précédé de ses
prêtres, Mgr Chênedru pénétra en sa cathédrale où son premier acte
fut de vénérer le reliquaire de la vraie Croix.
Edmée et Pauline se tenaient au milieu de la grande nef, sur le
passage du cortège ; elles reconnurent l’abbé Charmoy et l’abbé
Jacques ; celui-ci nageait dans une exultation ; il dirigea vers Pauline
un regard de victorieuse espérance. L’avènement du nouvel
archevêque signifiait pour lui la résurrection du diocèse ; et les plus
inertes paroisses tressailliraient sous la rafale d’enthousiasme qu’en
arrivant l’homme de Dieu suscitait déjà.
Pauline et son amie virent s’avancer près d’elles Mgr Chênedru ;
il éleva sa main et les bénit. Edmée s’inclina vivement pour baiser
l’émeraude de son anneau ; Pauline eut un léger recul ; n’étant pas
chrétienne, elle se trouvait indigne de cette faveur ; la recevoir eût
été un acquiescement de croyante, et elle n’allait pas encore jusque-
là.
Mais l’aspect de l’archevêque la conquit sur-le-champ. Bien qu’il
fût replet et d’une stature moyenne, il s’imposait par une puissance
d’autorité sans raideur et rayonnante ; il avait l’air d’être né pour tenir
la crosse et porter la mitre. Un visage opime, un œil qui étincelait,
des lèvres fines aux coins souriants d’où la parole semblait prête à
jaillir alors même qu’il se taisait, et surtout une bonté chaude qui
s’élançait au-devant des cœurs dans la persuasion de les atteindre,
tout faisait de lui une force en marche, douce et impérieuse ; quand
on le regardait, on ne pouvait plus douter que l’Église triomphante
existe.
Pendant qu’il lisait en chaire, d’une voix perçante, sa lettre
pastorale, Pauline sentit tomber ses dernières hésitations : d’une
telle bouche, comme de celle d’un apôtre qui aurait reçu du Christ
même sa doctrine, la vérité descendait.
Après le Salut, parmi la foule qui se pressait aux portes, elle
rencontra son oncle jubilant.
— Eh bien ! que vous semble de notre archevêque ?
— Je l’aime, répondit avant elle Edmée avec ferveur.
— Moi aussi, déclara Pauline, il m’a transportée.
— Je vous présenterai à lui, dit en les quittant l’abbé qu’un de
ses confrères entraîna vers la sortie.
La semaine suivante, dès que se fut écoulé le flot des réceptions,
il prit jour avec Mgr Chênedru et conduisit Pauline à l’archevêché.
Elle ne se vit pas introduite sans émotion dans le cabinet où
l’archevêque les attendait, debout derrière son bureau, contre sa
bibliothèque. Cette robe violette et l’idée d’omnipotence qu’elle
attachait à la dignité épiscopale lui imposaient une gêne :
« Que doit-il penser de moi, une infidèle ? »
Mais il embrassa, comme un père, l’abbé Ardel et fit à Pauline
elle-même un si affable accueil qu’elle reprit toute son aisance. Elle
exposa franchement l’état de son âme, l’indifférence orgueilleuse
d’où elle était partie, ses préventions d’ignorante contre les prêtres,
les doutes qui l’avaient retardée sur le chemin de la foi.
— J’étais encore incertaine, Monseigneur, continua-t-elle, quand
vous êtes venu parmi nous ; depuis que je vous ai vu et entendu, ma
décision est nette. J’ai médité tous les articles du Credo ; il n’en est
aucun auquel je ne puisse me soumettre, même l’enfer, bien qu’il n’y
soit pas nommé explicitement. Les peines éternelles me paraissaient
une chose monstrueuse, lorsque j’avais les plus fortes chances de
les mériter. Maintenant que j’espère ma rédemption, les rigueurs de
la justice divine ne me révoltent plus…
L’archevêque sourit de ce mot naïf et pénétrant.
— Réfléchissez et priez, ma chère enfant, approuva-t-il avec cet
accent du Béarn qui ajoutait une saveur à la bonhomie de son parler.
Je n’ai pas besoin de vous dire la grande joie que vous apporterez à
Notre-Seigneur et à moi, le jour où je pourrai vous donner le saint
baptême avant de vous confirmer.
— Dans combien de temps, demanda Pauline à son oncle
aussitôt qu’ils eurent pris congé de l’archevêque, pourrai-je être
baptisée ?
— A la Pentecôte, je pense. Avant peu, je reverrai Monseigneur
et l’abbé Charmoy.
Elle se sépara de lui et entra dans l’église qui allait être sa
paroisse, à Saint-Pierre-le-Rond. Fruste au dehors comme un vieux
sanctuaire de campagne, Saint-Pierre, sur une petite place toujours
déserte, est enclos entre les murs de logis silencieux. Pauline
affectionna, dès sa première visite, la nef étroite et longue, avec les
fenêtres du chœur découpées en trèfle. Un recueillement obscur
l’habitait où la pensée, mieux qu’ailleurs, pouvait « prendre son vol
sans bruit vers Dieu ». Elle se mit à genoux, dans le bas-côté, près
des fonts baptismaux, et là elle songea au mystère du Sacrement
qu’elle recevrait, à ce sceau du baptême qui, une fois imprimé sur un
front, ne peut plus s’en effacer.
Pourquoi cette efficacité surnaturelle de l’eau ? L’abbé Charmoy
lui avait un jour enseigné que toutes les eaux terrestres possédaient
une vertu de sainteté, depuis l’heure où Jésus sanctifia celle du
Jourdain en se courbant sous le baptême de Jean. L’eau purifie,
l’eau féconde, l’eau submerge ; elle se souvenait du verset d’un
psaume : Lavabis me et super nivem dealbabor, « tu me laveras et
je serai plus blanche que la neige » ; cette image lui plaisait en ce
qu’elle lui dévoilait le sens prophétique de sa course dans la neige
avec Julien. Maintenant il lui fallait s’ensevelir dans le Christ et
renaître avec lui, de même que les néophytes s’immergeaient trois
fois dans la piscine du baptistère primitif, de même que la novice du
Carmel, avant de prendre place au festin nuptial, s’anéantit sous le
drap mortuaire. Elle devait mourir à ses impiétés d’antan, à ses
vanités enfantines, à toutes les sensualités, et alors elle serait pure
comme la neige, comme l’eau d’une source où nul n’a jamais bu.
L’abbé Charmoy n’avait pas hésité à le lui dire : « Vous tomberiez
morte à l’instant de votre baptême, le Paradis vous recevrait aussi
sainte qu’un enfant qui n’a pas encore péché. »
Mais la vertu de l’eau n’opérait qu’unie à la parole, au nom du
Père, du Fils et du Saint-Esprit. Les Trois Personnes devant qui les
Anges trouvent à balbutier un seul mot : Sanctus, Sanctus, Sanctus,
viendraient donc en elle illuminer son âme et la diviniser !
« Qu’ai-je fait, ô Seigneur, pour mériter vos dons ? Je vous ai
dédaigné, nié, crucifié. Et, à présent, est-ce que je vous aime ? Est-
ce que je désire vous faire aimer ? »
Elle s’abîmait dans la repentance de ses rébellions, de son
aridité, de sa tiédeur, quand, tout d’un coup, une voix mauvaise, au
fond d’elle, articula :
 — Si, pourtant, tu t’abusais, si tu faisais la demande et la
réponse, si, là-bas, dans ce tabernacle, il n’y avait rien…
Mais elle repoussa l’idée affreuse, la piétina ; elle eût préféré
mille fois ne plus vivre que de ne plus croire ; et elle sortit, comblée
de la certitude que ses doutes étaient tués à tout jamais.
L’archevêque décida que le baptême, la confirmation et la
communion seraient donnés par lui à Pauline dans son oratoire, la
veille de la Pentecôte. Elle avait choisi pour parrain M. Rude, et
Mme Rude, en dépit de sa répugnance à se mêler d’aucune fête,
même liturgique, accepta d’être sa marraine. N’était-ce pas Julien
lui-même qui l’exigeait ? Et ce baptême serait l’accomplissement des
fiançailles mystiques de Julien avec sa bien-aimée.
Les Rude estimaient prudent de n’en point parler d’avance autour
d’eux. La nouvelle s’ébruita on ne sut comment, et les gens hostiles
à Victorien clabaudèrent par toute la ville.
— Hein ! répétait Galibert, cet Ardel qui se vantait de n’avoir pas
fait baptiser sa fille, ils l’ont retourné comme un gant !
Le plus venimeux furent Mlle Total, qu’il avait cessé de voir, et
Flug, avec qui il s’était brouillé, après avoir qualifié de « stupides »
ses paradoxes délirants. Un journal publia un entrefilet plaisantin sur
« les dragées du baptême », et ajouta que « seul, le poupon
manquerait ».
Informé de ces ragots par un obligeant collègue, Victorien
haussa les épaules, et répliqua très fort :
— Oui, ma fille va être baptisée, et c’est moi qui l’ai voulu. Leur
clique me dégoûte si bien qu’ils me donnent envie d’aller à la messe,
pour les faire enrager !
Depuis sa conversion, Pauline témoignait à son père une
tendresse de plus en plus prévenante ; elle évitait à son amour-
propre endolori les moindres blessures. Mais elle ne lui avait dit mot
de l’événement qui se préparait pour elle ; ce mutisme le peinait ; il
finit par se décider à le rompre lui-même :
— C’est pour bientôt la cérémonie ?
 — Pour samedi, répondit-elle avec un battement de cils et en
rougissant.
Et elle insinua d’une façon câline :
— Tu n’y viendras pas ?
— Non, je serais un trouble-fête, une fausse note. L’archevêque
et moi, vis-à-vis l’un de l’autre, nous serions mal à notre aise…
Elle n’insista point, ayant peur de moins bien prier, si la présence
de son père incrédule pesait sur sa ferveur.
Le matin du grand jour, elle se réveilla, comme une mariée qui va
mettre sa robe de noces, dans une attente extraordinaire. Elle avait
jeûné la veille, et son esprit se mouvait, presque dégagé de son
corps, avec une alacrité lumineuse. Dès six heures, elle sortit,
devant rejoindre, en la chapelle de son couvent, l’abbé Charmoy qui
la confesserait.
Il avait plu avant l’aurore ; sur le mail, où personne ne passait, un
vent d’est léger, le « matinal », comme disent les paysans de
Bourgogne, agitait dans les feuilles mouillées des platanes la
lumière aussi fraîche que la rosée. La nappe verte et claire des
frondaisons d’un acacia remuait dans le vivier du ciel ; les rossignols
se répondaient à travers les jardins ; une buée fumait sur des
massifs de fleurs ; la tour de la cathédrale était rose au soleil
montant.
« Tout à l’heure, se disait Pauline, je serai joyeuse comme ces
atomes de rayons qui dansent et qui scintillent. »
Mais la perspective de sa confession couvrait encore d’une
ombre le bonheur dont elle palpitait. Quoique ses entretiens avec
l’abbé Charmoy eussent, d’avance, allégé, pour elle, l’humiliation
des aveux, elle entra, presque tremblante, à l’intérieur du
confessionnal. L’exiguité noire et nue du recoin où ses yeux ne
distinguaient qu’une image de Jésus en croix et la grille fermée
d’une planche l’inquiétait comme un accusé qui attend, dans une
cellule austère, le moment de comparaître devant un juge infaillible.
Elle entendit l’abbé Charmoy enfiler son surplis, mettre son étole et
s’asseoir : était-ce le même prêtre dont elle connaissait le visage
bénin ? Mais, dès qu’il eut ouvert la grille et parlé, elle respira. A
chacune des fautes qu’elle énumérait scrupuleusement, il
prononçait, pour l’encourager, un : Bien, paisible. Son exhortation fut
une parole, moins de reproche que d’espoir grave. Pauline s’étonna
de la pénitence facile qu’il lui infligea ; trois psaumes à lire pour dix-
neuf ans d’infidélité ! Une critique qu’elle fit taire s’ébaucha en elle, à
l’idée d’une indulgence si exorbitante !
Elle lut aussitôt les trois psaumes ; car c’était ceux précisément
qu’on récite dans la liturgie du baptême, et, de tout son cœur, elle
s’appropria ces versets :
« Seigneur, notre Dieu, comme votre nom est admirable sur la
terre ! Votre magnificence est élevée au-dessus des cieux… Qu’est
l’homme, pour que vous vous en souveniez, et le fils de l’homme
pour que vous le visitiez ? Vous l’avez établi un peu au-dessous des
anges, vous l’avez couronné d’honneur et de gloire, vous l’avez
constitué sur les œuvres de vos mains…
« Comme le cerf désire les sources des eaux, ainsi le désir de
mon âme va vers vous, ô Dieu !… Quand viendrai-je et quand
paraîtrai-je devant la face de Dieu ? Mes larmes ont été, jour et nuit,
mon pain, tandis qu’on me disait : Où est ton Dieu ?… »
Elle partit en se chantant comme une mélodie les mots
extatiques : Quare tristis es, anima mea ?… Pourquoi étais-tu triste,
ô mon âme, et pourquoi me troublais-tu ? Espère en Dieu, puisque
tu le confesseras.
Les ailes de sa joie la portaient ; elle aurait couru sur des
charbons ardents avec l’illusion de marcher sur des roses. L’espace
se faisait bleu comme le vitrail du Paradis, dans la cathédrale ; elle
pensait, les yeux dirigés vers le soleil, à la vision de la Sibylle qui
aperçut, autour de l’astre, un cercle d’or, et au milieu du cercle une
Vierge merveilleuse, portant contre sa poitrine un enfant.
Armance et Antoinette, qu’elle avait invitées toutes deux à son
baptême, l’attendaient devant la porte de l’archevêché. Bientôt, le
parrain et la marraine arrivèrent avec Edmée et Marthe ; le grand
voile noir de Mme Rude et d’Edmée semblait cacher derrière elles le
fantôme de Julien. L’abbé Jacques et l’abbé Charmoy les suivirent
de près ; le secrétaire de l’archevêque, un jeune prêtre suave et
modeste, les fit tous monter dans l’oratoire, une chambre peu vaste
transformée en chapelle, et qui faisait songer à ces réduits où les
prêtres réfractaires, sous la Terreur, célébraient la messe. Mgr
Chênedru, en pluvial violet, entra presque aussitôt ; il s’agenouilla et
se recueillit ; on sentait dans son oraison muette qu’il soulevait vers
le Très-Haut les misères et l’imploration de tout un peuple ; en
baptisant Pauline il restituait au Christ une France qui ne peut cesser
d’être à Lui.
Il se tourna vers l’assistance, et s’adressant à la néophyte,
montra le prodige des largesses que Dieu, en un seul moment, allait
faire pleuvoir sur elle à pleines mains, la veille du jour où les langues
de feu étaient descendues, où les sept dons du Paraclet emplirent
les apôtres. Il évoqua les voies singulières par où elle avait été
conduite ; des allusions chaleureuses et pleines de tact à l’abbé
Ardel, à l’influence tacite des Rude, à Julien, à l’abbé Charmoy,
touchèrent d’un trait si juste le cœur de chacun que Mme Rude et
Edmée rabattirent leur voile devant leur figure, afin de pleurer
librement.
Mais, ajouta Mgr Chênedru, ce n’était point pour elle seule qu’elle
devait être chrétienne ; il fallait que sa naissance à la grâce fût un
signe et un exemple, et qu’autour d’elle la lampe ardente de sa piété
resplendît…
Ensuite, le baptême commença. L’archevêque, s’étant assis,
énonça, selon les formules rituelles, les mêmes questions que les
évêques des premiers siècles posaient, dans les catacombes, aux
jeunes chrétiennes de Rome.
Pauline y répondait en latin, et, chaque fois qu’elle réitérait le
simple mot : Credo, la conviction de sa foi s’implantait plus avant
dans son être, par cela seul qu’elle l’affirmait.
Puis, il se leva, l’exorcisa en soufflant sur elle ; et elle s’humilia
sans effort sous l’idée que sa personne avait pu être un temple de
l’Esprit immonde. Son âme, à cette heure, était souple, fondue
d’amour, telle que l’or liquide et rouge, quand on le verse dans le
creuset.
Il lui fit avec le pouce une croix sur le front et dit en même
temps :
— Signe ton front, pour que tu reçoives la Croix du Seigneur.
Et il continua :
— Signe tes oreilles, pour que tu entendes les divins préceptes.
Tes yeux, pour que tu voies la clarté de Dieu. Ton nez, pour que tu
sentes l’odeur de suavité du Christ. Ta bouche, pour que tu dises les
paroles de vie. Ta poitrine, pour que tu croies en Dieu. Tes épaules,
pour que tu prennes sur toi le joug de sa servitude…
Le Christ prenait possession de sa servante, l’investissait tout
entière, la voulant sienne « dans les siècles des siècles ».
L’archevêque exorcisa et bénit le sel qu’il mit sur la langue de
« l’Élue », afin que ce principe de force et de sagesse pénétrât dans
sa chair et y demeurât éternellement. Le parrain et la marraine
marquèrent, à leur tour, avec le pouce, le front de Pauline d’un signe
de croix. De la main du père et de la mère qui, par Julien, avaient
mis en elle les premiers rudiments de sa croyance, ce geste, trois
fois recommencé, équivalait à une attestation de leur paternité
acquise dans la douleur ; et ce fut, pour eux tous, une des minutes
les plus solennelles de la cérémonie.
Pauline suivait sur son Rituale romanum le sens intime des
oraisons, en apparence impersonnelles, mais exactement faites à
son intention. Dans un des exorcismes le célébrant disait :
— Tentateur maudit, ne viole jamais ce signe de la Croix sainte
que nous mettons sur son front… Va-t’en, tremblant et gémissant.
C’est Jésus-Christ qui te le commande, lui qui marcha sur la mer, et
tendit sa droite à Pierre qui sombrait.
C’était là une des images où elle se reconnaissait le plus
familièrement : l’élan de Pierre marchant sur les vagues à la
rencontre du Maître qu’il avait d’abord pris pour un fantôme, son cri
d’angoisse : « Seigneur, sauve-moi ! » et la main toute-puissante
tendue à sa faiblesse : « Homme de peu de foi, pourquoi as-tu
douté ? »
De même, plus loin, l’invocation au Dieu qui a ouvert les yeux de
l’aveugle-né lui remémora le mot de Julien, si vrai dans sa sévérité !
L’archevêque lui imposa sa main sur la tête ; avec lui et les
assistants elle prononça le Credo et le Pater ; il trempa son pouce
dans l’huile sainte, accomplit des onctions sur la poitrine et entre les
épaules de celle que le baptême allait sanctifier. Car l’instant était
venu pour Pauline de recevoir l’eau de la vie éternelle ; sa personne
était soustraite au Prince de ce monde ; elle pouvait devenir le
tabernacle de l’Esprit-Saint.
Une fois encore l’archevêque, en latin, lui demanda :
— Crois-tu au Dieu omnipotent, créateur du ciel et de la terre ?
— J’y crois.
— Crois-tu en Jésus-Christ, son fils unique, notre Seigneur, qui
est né et qui a souffert ?
— J’y crois.
— Crois-tu en l’Esprit-Saint, en la sainte Église catholique, en la
rémission des péchés ?…
— J’y crois.
— Veux-tu être baptisée ?
— Je le veux.
Alors elle s’inclina, il lui versa trois fois l’eau sainte sur sa tête ;
puis il lui mit un cierge entre les doigts, comme à une Vierge prête à
suivre le cortège de l’Époux.
Tout à l’heure, il demandait au Christ pour elle, en l’une des
oraisons, « de ne pas la laisser avoir faim longtemps, jusqu’à ce
qu’elle fût rassasiée de la nourriture céleste ». Cette nourriture, elle
l’attendait avidement. Lorsque l’archevêque l’eut confirmée, il ôta sa
mitre, revêtit une chasuble et dit la Messe, que lui servirent l’abbé
Charmoy et l’abbé Jacques.
 Pauline ne venait pas en vain de recevoir l’Esprit de sagesse et
d’intelligence. Tandis que la Messe se développait, elle entrait — ce
qu’elle n’aurait su faire auparavant — dans la sublimité du mystère
célébré devant elle et avec elle, puisque les chrétiens présents
officiaient, selon leur part de ferveur, en même temps que le prêtre
et l’invisible Officiant qui s’immolait.
Toute signée de la croix, elle la retrouvait multipliée sur la pierre
de l’autel, sur la chasuble, sur les instruments du sacrifice, dans les
gestes du célébrant. Mgr Chênedru articulait d’un ton haut les
prières du rite ; à la Consécration, il baissa la voix, mais proféra
lentes et distinctes les syllabes miraculeuses. Pauline sentit
réellement s’opérer la divine Présence, elle se vit couverte du sang
brûlant de la Victime ; elle aurait été confondue de tristesse en
pensant qu’elle-même avait ouvert ces veines et transpercé cette
chair, si l’attente de la communion ne l’eût saturée d’un bonheur
qu’ensuite elle s’étonna d’avoir pu porter. Ah ! comment des
hommes pouvaient-ils croire vivre, en ignorant de telles extases !
Elle ne se laissa point aller pourtant à une adoration passive. Elle
pria pour son malheureux père :
« S’il ne se convertit, ô mon Dieu, disait-elle, c’est que je ne
saurai pas vous aimer… »
Elle pria pour sa mère défunte, pour toutes les âmes perdues,
pour la déplorable paroisse de son oncle, pour le diocèse dénué de
prêtres, pour la France à ressusciter. Elle pria pour les pauvres sans
consolateur, pour les morts dont nul ne se souvient, pour les juifs et
les hérétiques, pour les immenses peuples qui seront idolâtres
jusqu’à la fin des temps…
Puis elle revint à ceux qu’elle aimait, aux Rouleau, aux deux
servantes, aux bons Rude, à l’abbé Charmoy, au saint archevêque,
à Julien qui lui méritait sa félicité. Elle s’unissait à lui dans le Christ,
comme jamais un amour terrestre ne les aurait unis. Dans la salle du
festin où l’Époux les conviait tous deux, elle entrait avec sa robe
blanche, immaculée, sa robe baptismale qu’elle ne quitterait plus.
 IX

Pauline était, depuis deux ans, chrétienne. La joie de son

baptême continuait, approfondie par l’intimité des Sacrements et la
richesse de méditations ardentes. Des peines cependant
l’obscurcissaient par intervalles : d’abord, elle avait honte d’elle-
même, quand elle évaluait son peu de charité, sa médiocre ferveur
de pénitence. Une chose l’humiliait surtout : elle ne pouvait prier,
même un temps court, sans distraction. Quelquefois la claire vue de
ses insuffisances la décourageait ; elle eût volontiers renoncé à
l’effort, se croyant vouée à trop d’imperfection. Puis elle rebondissait,
opposait ce qu’elle était à ce qu’elle avait cessé d’être, et s’exaltait
d’une gratitude inexprimable, lorsqu’elle mesurait son changement.
Mais il lui pesait de ressonger à ses années vaines : comme tout
cela était loin maintenant ! Une seule amertume les prolongeait,
l’incrédulité persistante de M. Ardel.
Il avait néanmoins changé, lui aussi. Le matin du baptême, au
retour de sa fille, dans ce beau visage une transfiguration l’avait
frappé ; un autre sang paraissait couler en ses joues, et la
transparence heureuse de ses prunelles renvoyait une lumière
séraphique. Il ne songea plus à nier que les vieux rites de l’Église
continssent encore une efficacité vitale. Mais il s’attendait à voir
Pauline, enflée par l’orgueil de sa conversion, s’éloigner de lui ; au
rebours, elle resta simple, affectueuse, soumise à ses désirs. Elle
rappelait une des figures de l’incomparable tapisserie du Trésor,
l’Esther couronnée par Assuérus, modeste dans sa gloire, comme si
elle devait en être toujours indigne. L’arome de paix qui sortait d’elle
agit peu à peu sur l’aigreur de Victorien ; il supportait plus
légèrement les déboires de sa carrière ; ses méfiances
s’atténuaient ; la sympathie plus équitable qu’il accordait aux
croyances de sa fille modifiait l’ensemble de son attitude critique.
Seulement, endurci à saisir les faits sous l’angle sec de l’intelligence,
il ne concluait pas le moins du monde qu’elle eût raison de croire, ni
qu’il dût la suivre.
— A mon âge, lui redit-il une fois, comme il l’avait dit à son frère,
on ne change guère son pli.
Il voyait souvent les Rude dans une amitié de plus en plus
étroite, et le peintre venait de lui annoncer un cadeau dont il était
charmé : le portrait de Pauline. Toutes les semaines, elle passait
donc, chez M. Rude, une après-midi. Elle s’asseyait, prenait un livre
captivant, et c’était en cette attitude de liseuse que l’artiste la fixait.
Un jeudi d’avril, M. Rude lui dit, d’assez mauvaise humeur :
— Nous n’aurons pas une longue séance aujourd’hui ; une visite
nous dérangera, Gabriel Authelin avec sa mère.
Gabriel Authelin remplaçait, dans la chaire de philosophie, Flug
que les suites d’une extravagance avaient contraint de s’en aller. A
propos d’une dissertation sur le mot de Montaigne : « Tout ciel m’est
un », Flug avait exposé que, pour le philosophe, la notion de patrie
demeurait inexistante : « Il me serait égal, avait-il déclaré, d’être
Allemand aussi bien que Français. » Là-dessus, deux de ses élèves,
se levant, avaient quitté la classe ; les autres, sauf un seul, s’étaient
empressés d’en faire autant ; des familles s’étaient plaintes, ses
chefs l’avaient blâmé, de sorte qu’il jugea prudent de porter ailleurs
sa métaphysique. Venant après lui, Authelin semblait justifier la
théorie platonicienne sur le rythme des contraires ; dogmatiste et
catholique, il était le neveu de cet abbé Authelin qui assista Mme
Rovère [1] dans sa maladie et sa prodigieuse guérison. Il avait connu
Daniel Rovère, le doux martyr, mort à Tarragone où les Chartreux
l’avaient recueilli. Sa philosophie, imbibée du mysticisme de Blanc
de Saint-Bonnet et d’Hello, y ajoutait un sens de la vie concrète,
d’autant plus surprenant qu’il était aveugle.
[1] V. l’Immolé.

C’était à l’âge de quatre ans, quand il vivait avec sa mère déjà

veuve et ses trois frères, à la campagne, près de Lyon, sur les
hauteurs du mont Cindre, qu’au moment d’un orage un coup de
foudre l’avait terrassé et avait brûlé ses yeux. Mais cette privation de
la vue stimula ses facultés natives ; ses autres sens s’étaient
emparés du monde extérieur avec une finesse suraiguë. A quinze
ans, il parlait sept langues ; sa mémoire, comme sa dialectique, se
faisait un jeu des connaissances les plus compliquées. Et il souffrait
peu de n’y plus voir ; car il se conduisait seul au dehors, distinguait si
son chemin était à droite ou à gauche, s’il longeait une place ou une
rue. Il voyait par les oreilles et le toucher ; la canne dont il s’aidait lui
communiquait sur les objets voisins des données précises. Ses
doigts lisaient aussi aisément que l’eussent fait ses yeux ; et, quand
il aimait un livre, sa mère patiente le copiait à son usage d’aveugle.
Sa vie méditative s’accroissait de tout ce que ses regards pouvaient
perdre ; il disait que sa « chambre obscure » ressemblait à certaines
chapelles de la cathédrale Saint-Jean où les ténèbres, en plein midi,
restent opaques, pour que l’on y puisse mieux faire oraison.
L’abbé Ardel, qui avait rencontré à Lyon Mme Authelin, lui inspira
le désir de connaître les Rude ; c’est pourquoi, ce jeudi, elle devait
leur conduire son fils.
Pauline et Edmée attendaient curieusement cette visite. Gabriel
entra, suivant sa mère, une femme de noble mine, plus grande que
lui, lente et mesurée dans sa démarche, par l’habitude qu’elle avait
de se mettre au pas de l’aveugle. Il tâtait, du bout de sa canne,
d’une façon discrète, le plancher. Il atteignit un fauteuil et s’assit
sans embarras. On se fût à peine douté, en l’apercevant, qu’il n’y
voyait rien. Il tenait ses paupières baissées, à la façon d’un
somnambule ; mais son front bombé, poli comme un marbre, ne
laissait point voir ce plissement douloureux, si habituel chez les
aveugles. Ses cheveux étaient longs, bruns comme sa barbe ; il