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Sociolinguistic analysis of a register: birthday notices in Papua New Guinea Post Courier
Author(s) -
HOLZKNECHT SUSANNE
Publication year - 1989
Publication title -
world englishes
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.6
H-Index - 49
eISSN - 1467-971X
pISSN - 0883-2919
DOI - 10.1111/j.1467-971x.1989.tb00653.x
Subject(s) - new guinea , elite , variety (cybernetics) , register (sociolinguistics) , lingua franca , linguistics , context (archaeology) , sociology , history , political science , ethnology , politics , law , computer science , philosophy , archaeology , artificial intelligence
This paper discusses the birthday notices which appear in the Classified Advertisements section of the Papua New Guinea Post Courier newspaper. The texts of these notices are analysed from a sociolinguistic perspective, and their context is considered in this paper to be a register of the variety of English which has become known as Papua New Guinea English. The birthday notices, which began to appear regularly from late 1984 onwards, have changed in frequency, nature and linguistic character since their first appearance. Socially, they provide one indicator of the existence of a self‐conscious urban elite in Papua New Guinea which is prosperous, literate, and is developing its own institutions and idioms for expressing these institutions. Linguistically, these notices indicate an awareness and manipulation of the Papua New Guinean variety of English which is the communicative lingua franca of this elite.