http://www.liaconferences.com/resources/types-of-world-english-2009-11.html
US
English
US English is of course particularly influential,
on account of America’s dominance of cinema, television, popular music, trade,
and technology, including the Internet. Many terms that enter an Oxford
dictionary from the US quickly become established in British English: some
examples from the last ten years or so are geek, nerd, school student, and
24/7. Many US equivalents for British terms are familiar: sidewalk for
pavement, checkers for draughts, cookie for biscuit, and vest for waistcoat.
Other differences are more subtle. Some words have a slightly different form,
e.g. dollhouse (US)/doll’s house (Brit.), math (US)/maths (Brit.), tidbit
(US)/titbit (Brit.), while American constructions that are strange to British
ears include I just ate, teach school, and a quarter of ten (rather than a
quarter to ten).
Canadian
English
Canadian English is subject to the conflicting
influences of British and American English. In vocabulary there is a lot of US
influence: Canadians use billboard, gas, truck, and wrench rather than
hoarding, lorry, petrol, and spanner; but on the other hand they agree with the
British in saying blinds, braces, porridge, and tap rather than shades,
suspenders, oatmeal, and faucet.
Australian
and New Zealand English
The vocabularies of Australian and New Zealand
English are very similar. Both have been enriched by words and concepts from
the hundreds of indigenous languages that pre-dated European settlers, only
about fifty of which continue as first languages. The line between formal and informal
usage is perhaps less sharply drawn in Australasian English than it is
elsewhere: suffixes such as -o and -ie, giving us expressions such as arvo
(afternoon), reffo (refugee), and barbie (barbecue), are freely attached to
words even in more formal contexts.
South
African English
Since 1994 South Africa has had eleven official
languages: English, Afrikaans (descended from Dutch), Zulu, Xhosa, and other
largely regional African languages. English is the first language of only about
10 per cent of the population, but the second language of many others. The
English of native Afrikaners has inevitably influenced the ‘standard’ English
of white South Africans, examples being such informal usages as the affirmative
no, as in ‘How are you? – No, I’m fine’ and the all-purpose response is it?, as
in ‘She had a baby last week – is it?’
Indian
English
The role of English within the complex multilingual
society of India is far from straightforward: together with Hindi it is used
across the country, but it can also be a speaker’s first, second, or third
language, and its features may depend heavily on their ethnicity and caste. The
grammar of Indian English has many distinguishing features, of which perhaps
the best-known are the use of the present continuous tense, as in ‘He is having
very much of property’, and the use of isn’t it as a ubiquitous question tag:
‘We are meeting tomorrow, isn”t it?’ The first example rejects another
characteristic of the language, which is to include intrusive articles such as
in or of in idiomatic phrases. Verbs are also used differently, with speakers
often dropping a preposition or object altogether: ‘I insisted immediate
payment’, while double possessives – ‘our these prices’ (instead of the British
English ‘these prices of ours’) – are commonplace.
West
Indian English
Standard British English has traditionally been the
linguistic model for the Commonwealth Caribbean, although recently the import
of US television, radio, and tourism has made American English an equally
powerful influence. The many varieties of Creole, influenced by West African
languages, are also productive. A characteristic usage is that of the objective
pronoun where British English would use the subjective or possessive, as in me
can come an go as me please or he clear he throat. Jamaican Creole is the most
widely known, and has spread beyond the region, especially to the UK, where it
influences the speech of black Britons.
