Word formation in Bangladeshi English
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.47941/ejl.2344Keywords:
World Englishes, Lexis, Corpus, Bangladesh, Bangladeshi English, GloWbE, NOWAbstract
Background: This paper aims to investigate the lexical properties of Bangladeshi English (BdE). Bangladesh does not have an official second language. Nevertheless, English has been present in Bangladeshi society for approximately four hundred years. The polity of Bangladesh is also silent about its position in the three-circle model of World English’s and does not have any proper plan for the English language. Very few studies have been done on the English of Bangladesh from World English’s perspective.
Methodology: Data is collected from five different sources; a survey, the Corpus of Global Web-Based English (GloWbE), the News on the Web (NOW), the Oxford English Dictionary, and one corpus compiled with 92 speeches of the former Prime Minister of Bangladesh. This corpus contains 101,490 words. The freeware corpus analysis toolkit Antconc is used to process the data of this corpus. The mixed method is followed in this work. Data is collected quantitatively and analyzed qualitatively.
Findings: The result of the study reveals that Bangladeshi English has rich lexical properties. These lexis are formed in different morphological processes. A good fraction of these lexis are noun, but adjective, verb, and adverb are also present.
Unique Contribution to Theory, Practice and Policy: These findings can be used as a starting point for further research.
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