Welcome

Welcome to the website for the Transcultural Englishes and the Gender-Inclusive Reform of Language (TEaGIRL) research project.

The TEaGIRL project was funded by the Discovery Project Program of the Australian Research Council 2003-2005. A key component of the TEaGIRL project was the online survey that was hosted here from January 2004 to June 2006. It proved extremely useful for the project and was adopted in many international undergraduate sociolinguistic courses. The TEaGIRL site no longer hosts the online survey. Please visit the Publications page for details of relevant articles that report findings of the TEaGIRL online survey. We have also published some statistics from the TEaGIRL survey on the online survey page of this site.

Overview of the TEaGIRL project

The research lies at the intersection of the globalisation of English, transcultural Englishes and social language reforms. We are interested in the relationship between transcultural Englishes across the world, especially between those that have been described elsewhere as ‘inner-circle’ Englishes and ‘outer-circle’ Englishes. The former include the Englishes used in the United States, Great Britain, Australia, Canada, New Zealand and the latter refer to Englishes used in places like Hong Kong, the Philippines and Singapore.

Our main objective is to explore the relationship between these Englishes with regard to social language reforms in the context of the globalisation of English. In particular we focus on language planning and reform issues linked to the linguistic representation of women and men.

The research examines relationships between the ‘local’ and the ‘global’, it explores meanings of transcultural Englishes with specific attention to the representation of gender.