History and people behind eWAVE ⇫ ¶

As a follow-up of the interactive CD-ROM accompanying the Mouton de Gruyter Handbook of Varieties of English (Kortmann, Schneider et al., eds. 2004), it was in 2008 that Bernd Kortmann and Kerstin Lunkenheimer joined forces in designing a considerably larger and more fine-grained database that could be used as an even more informative, less L1-centred research tool in comparative cross-dialectal and cross-varietal studies trying to map grammatical variation in the Anglophone world. In close collaboration with leading experts on the different variety types (including Lieselotte Anderwald, Susanne Michaelis, Rajend Mesthrie, Peter Mühlhäusler, Jeff Siegel, Peter Trudgill and Susanne Wagner) successive versions of a questionnaire were designed and discussed, before the version underlying eWAVE, with its 235 morphosyntactic features, was decided upon and sent out to the informants. One reason for (a) considerably extending the scope of morphosyntactic variation to be documented and (b) choosing the programming format was that right from the start eWAVE was meant to allow immediate comparisons with other large databases on grammatical variation, notably WALS ( The World Atlas of Language Structures; Dryer and Haspelmath, eds. 2011) and APiCS Online ( Atlas of Pidgin and Creole Structures Online; Michaelis, Maurer, Haspelmath, Huber, eds. 2013), both developed at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology (Leipzig). It was a unique opportunity that the same people who were trusted with programming APiCS were also allowed to spend a significant amount of their time programming eWAVE.

The 77 varieties, Pidgins and Creoles in the eWAVE sample ⇫ ¶

Table 1 provides an overview of the varieties, Pidgins and Creoles sampled in eWAVE and their distribution across variety types (see below) and world regions.

Table 1: eWAVE varieties

Variety types covered ⇫ ¶

The 77 data sets in the eWAVE sample fall into 5 broad classes of variety types, listed and briefly characterized below. The experts were asked to classify “their” variety as belonging to one of these variety types.

Domains of grammar covered in eWAVE ⇫ ¶

The 235 features in eWAVE cover phenomena from 12 different grammatical domains. An overview is provided in Table 2 below.

Table 2: Domains of grammar covered in eWAVE

Feature ratings ⇫ ¶

The information in the eWAVE database consists of judgements by top experts on each of the 77 varieties, Pidgins and Creoles on the frequency with which each of the 235 features can be encountered in the relevant variety, Pidgin, or Creole. The following classifications were used:

eWAVE statistics ⇫ ¶

1. Attestation

   Attestation is a relative measure of how widespread a feature is in the set of eWAVE varieties. It is expressed as a percentage and is calculated as the sum of all A-, B- and C-ratings for a feature, divided by the number of varieties in the eWAVE dataset. The closer the value to 100%, the more widespread the feature is.

2. Pervasiveness

   Pervasiveness provides a measure of how pervasive a feature is on average in the varieties in which it is attested. Pervasiveness is calculated as all A-ratings for a feature plus 0.6 times the B-ratings for the same feature plus 0.3 times the C-ratings, divided by the sum of all A-, B- and C-ratings for the feature. This value is then multiplied by 100 and expressed as a percentage. A Pervasiveness value of 100% or close to 100% thus indicates that the feature is highly pervasive (rated A) in all or most of the varieties for which it is attested, while a value close to 30% (the lowest possible value) indicates that the feature is extremely rare (rated C) in most or all of the varieties for which it is attested. Intermediate values are less easy to interpret – here one has to look more closely at the ratio of A- to B- to C-values. Two more things should also be noted here:

   1. The Pervasiveness value does not provide information on how widespread a feature is in the entire eWAVE dataset, i.e. for how many varieties the feature is actually attested.
   2. Since the eWAVE contributors did not all use exactly the same strategies in deciding when to give a feature an A- vs. a B- or a C- vs. a B- rating, it is very difficult to translate the ratings into numerical values that adequately reflect the differences between A-, B- and C-ratings. The choice made here (1 for A, 0.6 for B and 0.3 for C) is certainly only one of many, and further testing is required to see how adequate this model is.

Limitations and research potential of feature ratings ⇫ ¶

It should be obvious that in large-scale surveys such as eWAVE, APiCS or WALS, feature ratings need to be taken with a grain of salt. What looks categorical can hardly be more than an abstraction of and approximation to linguistic and social reality. Each of the varieties, Pidgins and Creoles included in eWAVE is itself subject to internal variation so that the profile emerging from the WAVE questionnaire for a given variety is unlikely to perfectly match the linguistic behaviour of any particular subgroup of speakers of that variety (e.g. different age groups). This is particularly true for the English-based Pidgins and Creoles and for the L2 varieties in the database. Typically, they have ethnically and socially diverse speech communities, so that features attested in WAVE may not be present in some speakers, or may be present with a different frequency, depending on which other languages they speak, and whether they are mesolectal, acrolectal or basilectal speakers. WAVE also glosses over regional variation in large speech communities like India or North America, when it subsumes them under one variety (‘Indian English’ and ‘Colloquial American English’). Moreover, the frequency-based ratings in most cases reflect the individual expert’s judgements since for many of the varieties, Pidgins and Creoles corpus data are not available at all, or only to a limited extent.

There is an enormous research potential behind each of these caveats, pointing to the fact that eWAVE is at least as much a starting-point for new research as it is the outcome of prior research. For example, for anyone working within variationist sociolinguistics or within the emerging field of variationist pragmatics (especially the pragmatics of grammar) it will be fascinating to zoom in on the individual data points of the eWAVE feature set. Especially promising in this respect are all the features rated 'B' or 'C' since they are the prime candidates for glossing over 'orderly heterogeneity'.

The future of eWAVE ⇫ ¶

The database eWAVE is 'e' in a double sense: it is electronic and it is e-volving. It is designed as something dynamic, as a constantly growing and improving teaching and research tool.  Thus, since the launch of eWAVE 1.0 in November 2011, quite a few changes and improvements have been made. With regard to the data, the most important of these are a number of corrections to feature ratings, the addition of two completely new data sets (Philippine English and Cape Flats English), and more than 2,400 new examples. Other new features include a list of references, export of filtered tables, and changes in filtering tools, navigation and general layout to fit in with the general architecture of APiCS and WALS.

We plan to continue updating and expanding eWAVE in the future, and as before we welcome the comments and suggestions of the international research community and all users. This will help eWAVE to continually gain in reliability, strength and richness as a tool in academic teaching and research.

Acknowledgements ⇫ ¶

There are many people and institutions, to some extent also lucky coincidences, eWAVE would have been impossible without. To start with, the two editors gratefully acknowledge the support of the Freiburg Institute for Advanced Studies (FRIAS) in the design and data collection phase of the project. Bernd Kortmann enjoyed an Internal Senior Fellowship at the FRIAS from April 2008 until September 2009 and Kerstin Lunkenheimer joined him there as a research assistant from September 2008 until March 2009. Kerstin and Bernd are also most indebted to the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology (Leipzig), particularly to Susanne Michaelis and Martin Haspelmath for much helpful advice, for letting us piggyback on their projects, for offering to host eWAVE on the MPI server and, above all, for giving permission to their brilliant in-house linguist programmers Hagen Jung, Hans-Jörg Bibiko and Robert Forkel to work on eWAVE alongside APiCS. Hagen did a fantastic job in the early stages, calmly listened to all the ideas on what this new research tool was meant to do and never tired in providing improved versions of eWAVE and searching for optimal solutions, often surprising the editors with new ideas, fascinating visualizations and query options that they had never thought possible. Hans-Jörg and Robert made sure that everything continued to work as both eWAVE and APiCS evolved, and made the transition from eWAVE 1.0 to eWAVE 2.0 as smooth as we could only wish.

Above all, the editors would like to thank the 83 collaborators serving as informants for this project. Without their readiness to devote a significant amount of their precious time to filling in the questionnaire, providing examples and answering our questions, eWAVE would have been impossible. A crucial motivation for making eWAVE available as an open access resource thus was that eWAVE should be owned by the entire research community, as a dynamic resource and platform that continues to be improved and expanded and that will serve as a point of reference as much as a point of departure in teaching and research on varieties of English all around the world.

References ⇫ ¶