As noted in section 1.1, beyond Britain the variety of English in the Indian diaspora that has been described in most detail is undoubtedly South African Indian English (Mesthrie 1992;
cf. also the overviews in Mesthrie 2004a, 2004b). Besides British Asian Englishes, this is the most obvious candidate for comparison with the dialect spoken by East African Indians in Leicester. South African Indian English differs from the varieties of English spoken in both India and among Indians in East Africa because, due to the lack of mutual intelligibility between Indic mother tongues (particularly Indo-European and Dravidian languages) and the absence of a common Indian lingua franca in the South African context, this variety underwent a shift from L2 to L1 by the 1960s (Mesthrie 1992, 2004b). The conditions of acquisition determined by apartheid policy, which involved limited contact with native speakers of British descent and considerable transfer from Indian languages, led to the development of features distinct from white South African English and to a certain
degree of continuity with Indian English. At the same time, though, a combination of influences also caused the emergence of differences from the latter:
in South Africa the substrate comprised of both Indic and Dravidian languages, causing a blend of Indic and Dravidian influence in InSAfE that I suspect is not found in India. And, of course, the features of L1 English of Natal as well as contact with Zulu and (to a small extent) Afrikaans made InSAfE further diverge from IndE (Mesthrie 2004b: 955).
In terms of phonology, for instance, several features typically found in Indian English are rare or absent in South African Indian English, e.g. monophthongisation of FACE and GOAT, retroflexion of /t/ and /d/, as well as interchange of /v ~ w/ (Mesthrie 2004b; see chapter 4 for the features relevant to this study). More recently, variation in South African Indian English has been investigated in the context of the sociolinguistic changes which have been affecting post-apartheid South Africa. Mesthrie (2010) undertook an analysis of GOOSE
fronting among middle-class South Africans from the Black, Indian and Coloured communities, showing that, while all ethnic groups participated in this global sound change, they did so to different degrees. Indian speakers in particular were divided between a more progressive group which displayed considerable accommodation to white (fronted) norms and a more conservative group that exhibited comparably little fronting.
Among the other strands of the Indian diaspora which have received scholarly attention are Indian communities in the United States and the Pacific. In the US, Sharma (2005a) examined the use of a range of syntactic and phonological variables by a group of first-generation Indian migrants who had settled in the San Francisco Bay area, with the aim of distinguishing individual second-language acquisition features and emerging dialect traits. She found that some syntactic variables (past tense marking, verb-subject agreement, copula use) fell into the first category while others (articles) belonged to the second (for the use of articles, cf. also Sharma 2005b). However, all syntactic features depended on speakers’ proficiency levels, whereas the phonological variables (rhoticity, /l/-velarisation, aspiration) did not, or did so to a much lesser extent. Instead, their use tended to correlate with informants’ attitudes towards the contact situation and American culture (see chapter 4 for more details on rhoticity). Work on the Indian diaspora in the Pacific includes Zipp (2014), an investigation of patterns of lexico-grammatical usage in Indo-Fijan English, and Hundt (2014, in preparation), a research project on language and identity construction
among Fiji Indian twice migrants in New Zealand. Finally, no sociolinguistic studies have been undertaken on English in the Indian diaspora in East Africa.
2.3 Summary
The survey in this chapter showed that sociolinguistic work on English in the Indian diaspora in the UK and elsewhere has been concerned with a number of questions, many of which are related to the emergence and transmission of L1-derived features or, more generally, contact-induced innovations. In research on the British Asian diaspora, the focus has predominantly been on locally-born generations. The few studies that looked at the speech of first-generation migrants invariably reported retention of L1-influenced traits.
Despite common claims in the dialect acquisition literature that second-generation migrants do not acquire the foreign accent of their parents, UK-born South Asians were also widely shown to use L1-derived features. An exception in this regard are the studies of Evans et al.
(2007) and McCarthy et al. (2011), who found their second-generation informants to approximate the SSBE phonological system.
L1-derived features are often functionally reallocated among British-born speakers and vary in connection with a number of external factors, including ethnic orientation, local (ethnic) identity, community of practice membership, friendship groups and wider social networks, as well as gender and age (which in turn was reported to reflect the socio-historical circumstances in which different age groups grew up). Adolescents from South Asian and other ethnic backgrounds were also shown to creatively employ a mix of Punjabi, Indian English, Caribbean Creole and Cockney elements to signal, for example, inter-ethnic solidarity and working-class alignments, and to index a new type of hybrid ethnic identity, a practice carried over into adulthood by at least some speakers. On the whole, these findings provide little support for cognitive explanations like the innate accent filter hypothesis, rather suggesting that social factors play a major role in the locally-born generation’s shift to the local dialect or maintenance of L1-derived traits. Finally, a number of studies demonstrated that some (but not all) innovations generated within South Asian and other ethnic minority communities spread beyond these communities and are picked up by white British English speakers. This indicates that the varieties of English spoken by South Asian and other ethnic minority groups are an important source of innovation and change in present-day British English.
The brief sketch of work on English in other strands of the Indian diaspora showed that in some countries (e.g. South Africa) Indian communities developed varieties of English that are distinct both from Indian English and from the local dialects of white settlers, and that attitudes to the host community and local culture can also play an important role in the retention of L1-derived accent traits and in the adoption of local phonological features by first-generation migrants (e.g. in the San Francisco Bay area).