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Article published In: Corpus-Pragmatic Studies of Democratization in Public Discourses: New perspectives, methods and materials
Edited by Turo Hiltunen, Turo Vartiainen and Jenni Räikkönen
[Journal of Historical Pragmatics 25:2] 2024
► pp. 193–214

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Colloquialisation

Twenty-five years on

ORCiD logo with link | University of Freiburg
Published online: 9 August 2024
DOI logo with link
https://doi.org/10.1075/jhp.00073.mai
Abstract
Surveying a representative sample of studies of colloquialisation, a tendency for written norms to move closer to spoken usage, the chapter explores:
i.
the relationship between colloquialisation, operationalised in exclusively linguistic terms, and informalisation and democratisation, two processes primarily targeting wider sociocultural change, and
ii.
complications arising when colloquialisation is extended beyond its original domain of application, standard written English of the ENL type.
There are two major findings. Colloquialisation works less well in the study of ESL varieties than ENL ones. In addition, recent real-time analyses of change in spoken English suggest that the supposedly homogeneous baseline style of informal conversational English is more internally variable than is assumed in current work on colloquialisation.
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction: Colloquialisation, conversationalisation, informalisation, democratisation
  • 2.Colloquialisation – historical development and present status of the term
  • 3.Adapting colloquialisation for use in second-language environments
  • 4.Stable baseline or elusive target? Variability within colloquial English
  • 5.New public conversations: An example of colloquialisation-induced semantic change?
  • 6.Conclusions and perspectives for further research
  • Notes
  • References
References (42)
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