The team has been careful to make sure the data is transcribed
as closely as possible to the original speakers’ usage. Native speaker
norms are not used as a benchmark, as any use of native speaker
norms as the linguistic benchmark against which ‘correctness’
is judged would be inappropriate for several reasons. First, the
presence of native speaker varieties of English means that there
are several native speaker ‘norms’. The American ‘different than’
and the British ‘different from / to’ is but one example. Second,
the presence of so many non-standard forms in all vernacular
varieties of English suggests that, in the spoken world at least,
variation is the rule rather than the exception. As Britain has
pointed out in his discussion of vernacular varieties of British
English, ‘Standard English is a minority dialect in England’ (2010,
p. 37). Third, the development of newer varieties of English –