Submission Guidelines

Despite attempts immediately after independence to reduce the importance of English as an important language in India, it continues to be used widely in India. Its most important domains are public contexts such as education, administration, business and politics, but it is also used widely by Indians who travel or reside in a region whose local language they do not speak. English is the primary domestic language for only a small minority, although many others use it at home when discussing topics belonging to the public domain, as for example when a parent asks their child what happened at school that day. Around 23 % of the population of India have at least basic knowledge of English, and 4 % are fluent. Based on the 2011 census, this means there are 50 million fluent speakers (Desai et al. 2010, Sailaja 2009, 2012, Fuchs 2014).

While it is widely recognised that English in India is not a monolithic entity and that there is variation across, among others, variables such as education and first language/mother tongue, there is a growing consensus that there is an identifiable variety of English spoken in India, sometimes called a neutral accent, that is locally prestigious, shows limited clearly identifiable traces of mother tongue influence, and that is often spoken by and aspired to by educated Indians (Cowie 2007, Maxwell & Fletcher 2009, 2012, Sirsa & Redford 2013, Fuchs 2016). However, the existing evidence is still limited in a number of ways, among them by the number of phonological variables, the number of distinct mother tongue groups and educational backgrounds that have been investigated. A related field of enquiry is the study of Indian Englishes spoken in the diaspora (e.g. Kirkham 2011), which, despite its early successes, is still limited in terms of phonological variables and geographic coverage (with the bulk of the studies focusing on the United Kingdom, notwithstanding exceptions such as Leung & Deuber 2014).

This workshop will provide a forum for empirical studies on the phonetics and phonology of English in India and Indian Englishes in the diaspora. A particular aim of the workshop is to encourage exchange and collaboration between Indian and international researchers.

List of Topics

We encourage submissions on the following topics, among others:

• Locally prestigious forms of English
• Variation in terms of educational background, socio-economic status, geographic mobility within and outside of India, first language/mother tongue, among others
• Indian Englishes in the diaspora
• Intelligibility, but within and outside of India
• The pronunciation of English used in classrooms, both by teachers and in aural and textual instructional materials

Committees

Program Committee

• Claire Cowie, Edinburgh
• Dagmar Deuber, Münster
• Robert Fuchs, Hamburg
• Ravinder Gargesh, Delhi
• James Lambert, Singapore
• Olga Maxwell, Melbourne
• Hemalatha Nagarajan, Hyderabad
• Pingali Sailaja, Hyderabad
• Lukas Sönning, Bamberg
• Caroline Wiltshire, Gainesville/Florida
• Sabine Zerbian, Stuttgart

Organizing committee

• Robert Fuchs, University of Hamburg, Germany
• Pingali Sailaja, Central University Hyderabad, India

Contact

All questions about submissions should be emailed to robert.fuchs@uni-hamburg.de