Towards an automated classification of Englishes

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Wichmann, S.; Urban, M.: Towards an automated classification of Englishes. In: The Oxford Handbook of the History of English, 676-686 (Hrsg. Nevalainen, T.; Traugott, E. C.). Oxford Univ. Pr., Oxford [u.a.] (2012) 3rd revised version. 18 pp.As first steps towards rethinking a topic of research it is fruitful to divorce one’s approach from the conventional ones, to develop new methodologies, and to apply them in consistent ways ignoring divisions of fields of research imposed by the tradition. In this paper we apply a relatively new methodology, that of an automated lexicostatistics using the so-called ‘Levenshtein distance’, to varieties of English, treating dialects and creoles in essentially the same way. Thus, we follow the example of Kortmann and Schneider and some of the other contributors to this handbook in including both Englishes traditionally understood to be ‘dialects of English’ and Englishes understood to be creoles or pidgins (henceforth ‘creoles’). We do treat the two categories distinctly, using a finer phonetic resolution for the dialects than for the creole data, but the basic methodology is the same. Using the same set of data, we then go on to look at the distribution of diversity among dialects of English. Studying phonetic diversity in global varieties of English is relevant for the history of the language, and for rethinking this history.