20 - Multilingualism and the World Englishes

Summary

The chapter provides an overview of the ways in which English has existed within a framework of multilingualism in all countries where it is spoken. The first part considers English beyond the shores of Britain, where it was initially introduced to contexts in which indigenous populations and their languages already existed, such as America, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand. Later, as English was introduced to countries in Africa and Asia that were colonized by the British, such as Nigeria and India, it added to the multilingual patterns that already existed in those places. English has continued to rise in importance in countries that have no links to a colonial history or where it has no official function; this is often linked to processes of globalization in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. In these countries, English is often part of an individual’s multilingual repertoire. The chapter finally returns to Britain, where the myth of English monolingualism probably persists the most. Both historical and modern-day multilingualism are discussed and a case study is presented to demonstrate how multilingualism has impacted on the English variety spoken in London today.