Reviews current research to investigate the way the power and politics of genre is often exploited by the so-called established membership of disciplinary communities to keep outsiders at a safe distance. Argues that the privilege to exploit generic conventions to create new forms becomes available only to those few enjoying a certain degree of…

Argues that instruments normally applied to the analysis of discourse, and that originate in the Western tradition of analyzing language, must be used with extreme caution in analyzing new varieties of English. To substantiate this claim, the article uses as an example the recent work on the emergence of Batswana English. (Author/JL)

Examines competition between conflicting principles in Kenyan English (animacy hierarchy and discourse pressure to place given information before new), manifested in news discourse. Results suggest some differences between spoken and written Kenyan English pointing to a tendency toward a more standard native-speaker variety in news discourse, and…