Colak, Serwin

How do young multi-ethnic Danes use the English language and what is their access to English like? The aim of this present study is to examine young multi-ethnic Danes’ usage of the English language, in particular their usage of subject-verb agreement and do-support. The purpose of the study is to investigate which internal grammatical and external social factors determine correct and incorrect usage in multi-ethnic Danish speakers of the three chosen variables, dealing with third- person singular -s, be and have, and do-support. The methodology for the analysis is within the framework of variationist sociolinguistics with the use of tools from variation analysis as the research method. Thus, the present study consists of both a qualitative and quantitative approach. The qualitative approach lies in the collection of ten semi-structured interviews that have been carried out to acquire a systematic sample of naturally, occurring speech. The quantitative approach consists of a multivariate analysis which has been used to find patterns in the selected data. The purpose of these approaches was, therefore, also to answer the question of what interview data can reveal, when analyzed quantitatively, about these speakers’ proficiency and language patterning. The study shows that the external social factors, such as ‘gender’, did not have a significant effect on why the speakers got the agreement wrong. This can, therefore, indicate that the speakers were behaving as a single group and that they were not socially nor linguistically differentiated. However, some of the internal linguistic factors did have a significant effect on why the speakers made errors with the variables. The linguistic factor, ‘subject form’, had a significant effect on each of the grammatical contexts, and ‘verb’, ‘be or have’ and ‘number’ also had a significant effect on the be and have variable. The speakers have proven to have more difficulties with noun phrase subjects than pronouns and preliminary subjects, as they have more difficulties figuring out whether the nouns are plural or singular. Therefore, it can be assumed that these multi-ethnic Danes have learned pronoun forms and their associated verbs as little ‘chunks’, but not how to use the correct grammatical form when it comes to nouns. This may be a result of a lack of explicit teaching of English grammar in schools and especially explicit teaching of how agreement works with nouns. The study, therefore, concludes that there is a possibility of a new linguistic system developing among these Danes, whereby third-person singular -s only consistently applies to pronouns and not nouns

Multi-Ethnic Danes and the English Language

Abstract

Similar works

Full text

Available Versions

Roskilde Universitet