World Englishes at the Grassroots

In 2021 and 2022, we received generous funding from RUB’s Rectorate to embark on more thoroughly describing uses of second and foreign language Englishes, including as a lingua franca, as they are increasingly often encountered in the world’s many societies: among the lower social strata, at the grassroots.

While English has long been discussed as a pluricentric language that exists in numerous varieties, the overwhelming majority of research, as well as the data on which it is based, represent the English of an upper middle class. With this strong focus on middle class speakers, English linguistics, including world Englishes studies, is lagging behind other branches of linguistics, particularly sociolinguistics, in describing the realities of all users of English and discussing their theoretical significance.

The Chair’s warm interest in the topic (see our publications here) is not only due to RUB’s location within the Ruhr Valley, with its history of coal mining and steel production, but also stems from Christiane Meierkord’s background as a proud daughter of a shoemaker and a shop assistant. Both allow us to understand the concerns of grassroots informants and how to best approach and work with them, which, we believe, must involve citizen science methods. This means that we have started to integrate lay people in our data collection and interpretation processes.

Given the Chair’s long history of research in South Africa and Uganda and the many contacts established there, we have focused on these two countries for our exploratory endeavours in the last two years. After contacting a number of self help organisations and community upliftment programmes, strategies for recruiting, training and sustaining citizen scientists with contact to grassroots users of English were discussed and developed. Together with colleagues, we next identified suitable equipment and websites (in our case Kobo Toolbox) via which the citizen scientists eventually submitted their data.

The central part of the project was the production of videos to explain the data collection task and consent management to the citizen scientists. Together with a manual and Power Point slides that support local colleagues in presenting the project idea to the citizen scientists, these videos were tried on location and revised between February and June 2022. Below are some screenshots from the videos that have resulted from this process.

In July 2022, three citizen scientists then collected their first data. Below is an example of written English that they have collected from grassroots users as well as part of a transcript of one of the recordings they obtained.

We are currently extending our activities to include Ecuador and the Philippines (RUB and the Chair have established research affiliations in both countries over that last three years) as well as West African and Philippine immigrant communities in North Rhine-Westphalia. If you share our passion in researching Englishes at the grassroots, please do contact us.