Epicentral influences of Indian English on Nepali English

Abstract

The present paper investigates India's potential role as a linguistic epicentre for Nepal by conducting a short-term diachronic follow-up study of Bernaisch and Lange (2012) that is based on the South Asian Varieties of English corpus. Based on the recently updated version of the corpus with similar data from a decade later, a potential spread of the presentational itself construction with an adverbial focus, which has allegedly spread in Nepal originating in Indian English, is investigated. Also, possible instances of invariant use of itself, that are frequently used in Indian English, will be scrutinized. While findings indeed show an increase of the adverbial focus construction, supporting India's role as an epicentre for the region, only one invariant use of the feature can be documented in Nepali English, which can tentatively be interpreted as a selection process that might be at play in the acceptance and spread of certain epicentrally induced features over others.