The Routes of English

Area 10 – Scienze dell'antichità, filologico-letterarie e storico-artistiche

The Routes of English is a study for university students who need to become efficient and flexible users of a vast range of discourses linked to everyday multicultural and multimodal communication in English. Its purpose is to discuss the English language as a heterogeneous system characterized by hybridity, envisioning it within the context of the global movements and migrations that have changed the linguistic ecology of the entire world. While emphasizing that individuals communicate across national and cultural boundaries by using English, the work focuses on the emergence of a number of diverging and multiple varieties of Englishes. In doing so, it offers an overview of the main processes that have influenced the development of the language through the centuries, and it accounts for the scholarly paradigms attempting to describe and categorize its unprecedented spread. The text then provides a linguistic corpus and analyzes a series of case-studies featuring the relevant characteristics of two varieties of English, in particular, Bajan and Jamaican Creole.Maria Cristina Nisco is currently a lecturer in English language at the University of Molise, the SUN, and the University of Naples “L’Orientale” where she holds her PhD in “Cultural and Postcolonial Studies of Anglophone Countries”. She has researched and published on postcolonial theory, postcolonial literatures and visual works, and translation.

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