Discourse particles in Indian English: “Where’s the party yaar!”

Lange, Claudia

doi:10.1075/veaw.g40.14lan

In:World Englishes – Problems, Properties and Prospects: Selected papers from the 13th IAWE conference
Edited by Thomas Hoffmann and Lucia Siebers
[Varieties of English Around the World G40] 2009
► pp. 207–226

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“Where’s the party yaar!”

Discourse particles in Indian English

Claudia Lange | Technische Universität Dresden

Published online: 23 September 2009

https://doi.org/10.1075/veaw.g40.14lan

For some reason, Indian English (IndE) discourse particles have not been as popular with the World Englishes scientific community as their counterparts in Singapore English. Whereas the whole range of discourse particles in colloquial Singapore English has already been treated quite exhaustively, the available literature only offers some scanty remarks on individual IndE discourse particles. This paper will attempt a systematic treatment of the meaning and use of the IndE discourse particle yaar on the basis of data from the spoken part of The International Corpus of English, Indian component (ICE-IND). Since ICE-IND also includes information about speakers’ sociolinguistic profiles, the descriptive account of the meaning of yaar will be augmented by an analysis of the distribution throughout the IndE speech community.

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