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7 - A Sociolinguistic Ecology of Colonial Britain

from Part II - World Englishes Old and New

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  16 December 2019

By
David Britain
Edited by
Daniel Schreier ,
Marianne Hundt  and
Edgar W. Schneider
Daniel Schreier
Affiliation:
Universität Zürich
Marianne Hundt
Affiliation:
Universität Zürich
Edgar W. Schneider
Affiliation:
Universität Regensburg, Germany
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Summary

In this chapter, I look at the sociolinguistic context that colonists, settlers, pioneers, convicts, and others left when embarking on their travels. It does not therefore look at the migrants themselves or their linguistic profiles per se but at the social and linguistic ecology of Britain at the time colonization began. Its aim, therefore, is, for the colonial period that peaked in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, to sensitize the reader to some of the critical domains that shaped the prevailing linguistic landscape: multilingualism and multidialectalism in Britain; patterns of internal mobility and their linguistic consequences; the British education system and literacy before compulsory education and prevailing language ideologies, and the implications they had for the language use in the British Isles.

Keywords

colonial Britainmultilingualismlanguage variationmobilityliteracylanguage ideologies
Type
Chapter
Information
The Cambridge Handbook of World Englishes , pp. 145 - 159
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2020

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