Lexical Borrowing And Periodization Of World Englishes

The global expansion of the British Empire from the seventeenth to the mid-twentieth century has been the origin of the unprecedented spread of Contemporary English and the emergence of English varieties.The process of the emergence could be divided into five phases according to the dynamic model of the evolution of postcolonial Englishes:foundation,exonormative stabilization,nativization,endonormative stabilization,and differentiation,based on four constitute parameters:extralinguistic background,identity constructions,sociolinguistic conditions,and typical linguistic consequences.During the process,words in the local languages are borrowed into the local variety of English.Toponyms are borrowed at the first stage of foundation,names for flora and fauna are borrowed at the second phase of exonormative stabilization,and from the phase three of nativization,culture terms are borrowed.Nevertheless,the relationship between lexical borrowing and periodization has been rarely studied.The current study focuses on the case of the diachronic changes of indigenous words in Indian English in the past two decades,aiming to research how the changes could be used to interpret the position of Indian English in the dynamic model.It is found that overall the total number of indigenous words in India has a dramatic decline,however,the total occurrence of these words substantially improves from early 2000s to the year 2017,thus the ratio of the total number of words and occurrences decreases.In addition,the proportions of occurrences of most frequent words are much higher in the year 2017 than in early 2000s.The diachronic changes could be considered as a mark of phase three of nativization.Yet if categorizing the words into nine categories,food,clothing and textile,music and art.religion,people,politics,animals and nature,culture,and others,it could be seen that the distributions of most of the categories are consistent with the overall distribution,which could be regarded as a sign of the phase four of endonormative stabilization.Hence,the analysis of the distributions of indigenous words in Indian English in early 2000s and the year 2017 underlines that the features of both nativization and endonormativity coexist in present-day Indian English.