Contextual variability in the acceptability of Kenyan English grammatical features

Abstract

The present study set out to find out whether a number of grammatical features assumed to be characteristic of Kenyan English would be accepted at different levels depending on three parameters of linguistic context: the lexical item used in the feature2 under study, the position of the feature in the sentence, and the type of sentence which the feature appears in. A two-part questionnaire consisting of a series of sentences containing “mistakes” to be corrected was administered to an overall sample (composed of eight sub-samples) of 218 educated Kenyan English speakers. The results, based on chi-square statistics, show that a structure like Type for me this letter was significantly more accepted (that is less often corrected) than Buy for me lunch, that when the feature under study was placed within the sentence it tended to be more accepted than when it was placed at the beginning or at the end of the sentence, and that question structures were more accepted than declarative and negative ones.