The core and periphery of world Englishes: a corpus‐based exploration
Gerald Nelson · World Englishes · 2006
Abstract: This paper is concerned with the ‘common core’ of world Englishes. This is defined as the set of features and characteristics which all varieties have in common. It is also concerned with the ‘periphery’, that is, those features which are unique to individual varieties, and are not shared with any other variety. The study is based on comparisons of wordlists from electronic corpora of six varieties, and it attempts to examine the core and periphery of these in both quantitative and qualitative terms. It offers a measure of the relative sizes of the core and periphery, and goes on to compare the core and periphery in terms of their grammar and morphology. The core is found to be grammatically conditioned to a much greater degree than the periphery, which in turn results in very striking morphological differences between the two.