In this chapter, we will examine the emergence and evolution of the language called English. One of the first questions we will seek to answer is: Is English ‘English’? In other words, did English originate in the geographic area known today as England? To answer this question, we journey back to the roots of English, beginning with Indo-European. We then begin the story of English, with the emergence of Old English from 449 CE, after which we move into the era of Middle English, focusing on the impact of Anglo-Norman French. The emergence of English literature, and particularly the work of Chaucer, during this period is also discussed. We willexamine how British international trade and colonization of the Americas, Australia, and New Zealand, as well as parts of Asia, the Caribbean, and Africa, changed and spread the English language worldwide. The chapter concludes with an overview of the terminology used to describe the varieties of English that will be examined in this volume. The final section of the chapter has a series of exercises and tasks to guide you through a revision of the contents of the chapter.

Chapter 6 extends the discussion of multilingual development to the so-called New Englishes as symbolic systems that developed in the former colonial territories and continued to develop after the collapse of the British Empire in the newly created independent polities. More precisely, the focus here lies on outer circle Englishes in the sense of Kachru (1985). The New Englishes are analyzed from the perspective of their surrounding multilingual ecologies and not, as is more customary, in terms of hermetically delineated national varieties of English. On that account, the chapter focuses on recent – and also more historical – multilingual outcomes of globalization where English plays a prominent role, has been incorporated into the local ecologies, interacts with many other languages, and shows or is beginning to show traces of localization or nativization. Case studies include Singapore, Hong Kong, and Dubai. The chapter thus brings together the key issues discussed in the preceding chapters – globalization, migration, urban areas, multilingual advantages or effects, cross-linguistic influence, language acquisition and learning, language policies, identities, and attitudes – and pivots them on contexts of particular prominence.

This chapter traces the expansion of English from its beginnings to its present-day global role. Viewed from a geographical perspective, settlement moves and colonization have re-rooted the English language to different continents and countries, producing distinct contact types. We outline these developments from their historical and demographic perspectives as well as with respect to linguistic contact conditions for North America (including African American English), Southern Hemisphere varieties (Australia, New Zealand, and South Africa), and second-language postcolonial Englishes in Africa and Asia. In addition, it is shown how recent, vibrant processes have established new forms of English in new contexts, including non-postcolonial countries, lingua franca uses, and in cyberspace, thus producing radically new contact ecologies. Contact scenarios in these processes have involved dialect contact between native speakers from different regions, the process of structural nativization based on local feature pools, various degrees of restructuring and creole formation, and the genesis of hybrid varieties and innovative multilingual settings. We outline theoretical approaches to grasp these processes, including the Dynamic Model of the evolution of postcolonial Englishes, the Extra- and Intra-territorial Forces Model, and the postulate of different types of “nativeness.”

Relative to the first- and second-wave traditions of variationist sociolinguistics, language change has not been a central concern of work in the third wave. Indeed, most research in the third wave has not mentioned language change at all, focusing instead on social meaning and on language’s role in the construction and performance of identities, styles, and stances. Nonetheless, research in this tradition that has addressed language change (e.g., Hall-Lew et al., this volume; Zhang, this volume) makes evident that the approach has a great deal to contribute, particularly in accounting for the social motivations underpinning change.

Setting the agenda for the volume, this introduction amalgamates the so far relatively isolated strands of research into genderlectal variation and World Englishes, relying on state-of-the-art empirical approaches. As they apply to the vast majority of speakers of English around the world, the notions of English as a second language and English as a foreign language are introduced and – in this light – recent attempts at bridging this paradigm gap between these two speaker groups as well as the models employed in these attempts are briefly discussed. For the study of gender and language, the central pillars of its most prominent theoretical waves – the dominance, the difference and the social construct framework – are presented and the corresponding methodological approaches critically appraised. Against this background, it is concluded that responsible explorations of genderlectal variation in World Englishes need to be based on transparent empirical foundations – both in terms of datasets and statistical modelling. For this reason, the tenets of corpus linguistics are explored and the benefits of multifactorial statistical techniques as consistently applied in this volume are illustrated. After previews of the individual chapters in the volume, the introduction ends with summarising remarks including the moderator function of gender in World Englishes.

This chapter addresses a number of basic facts about how languages work, and these are applied to the evolution of English in its global context. A few basic notions are introduced and defined – including dialect, accent, and variety. Widespread prejudices as to language “correctness” are compared to the notion of communicative adequacy in given contexts. All languages are found to vary, i.e. there is typically a choice between alternative realizations of linguistic entities on the language levels of pronunciation (phonetics and phonology), vocabulary (lexis), and grammar (syntax). Global varieties of English show variation on each of these levels, which can be explained by processes and principles of language change and language contact between speakers of different languages who communicate with each other and transfer forms from one language to another in bilingual or multilingual minds. Conceptualizations and categorization frameworks for the new varieties of English around the globe are introduced, including the ENL-ESL-EFL distinction and Kachru’s “Three Circles” model, as well as the “Dynamic Model” which suggests five subsequent developmental stages which newly emerging postcolonial varieties typically go through.

From a bird’s-eye perspective, the English language in South Asia has developed from a contested colonial legacy into an asset within the linguistic ecology of the region, both intra-nationally and pan-regionally. With more and more speakers and contexts of use in a population of well over a billion, English has become a firmly entrenched South Asian language with distinctive characteristics, effectively the third-largest variety of English worldwide. This chapter outlines the sociohistorical background to the development of English in South Asia from the beginning of British colonialism in the area to the present day. The main focus is on English in India as the largest state to emerge out of the former British Raj and arguably the historical input variety to other South Asian Englishes. In presenting distinctive features of Indian English vis-à-vis other South Asian Englishes, the notion of Indian English as the regional epicenter is also taken into account.

South African history provides a uniquely complex environment for the development of New Englishes, a fact reflected in recent work which has both questioned Schneider’s Phase-4 ‘placement’ of South African English (SAfE) in terms of the Dynamic Model (DM) and argued for refinements to the DM to account for SAfE’s current relative lack of homogeneity and the different phases that different South African Englishes appear to be in. It is argued here that the sociohistorical role played by the Afrikaans-speaking community is the main source of this unique complexity. The European background of the IDG strand created conditions for extremely rapid convergence with the STL strand, in effect ‘collapsing’ Phases 1 to 3 of the DM. Concurrently, Afrikaner separatism and nationalism actualized a countervailing divergent tendency that has not been incorporated into the DM. Thus, the DM rests on an overly optimistic social psychology and sociology, with an over-emphasis on convergent forces; while the actualization of this convergence explains existing developmental similarities across New Englishes worldwide, it is an historical accident unreflective of a ‘deeper’ (universal) balance between centripetal and centrifugal forces.

This paper summarizes scholarly approaches to varieties of South African English, mainly from the perspective of World Englishes theorizing. South Africa's complex ethnic composition has produced a range of distinctive varieties of English and has defied simplistic notions of dialect evolution. Neither Kachru's “Three Circles” model nor Schneider's “Dynamic Model” allow coherent accounts of South African English as a whole in their respective frameworks. In contrast, many South African scholars, often extrapolating from the “Dynamic Model”, have highlighted the need to focus on internal sub-varieties rather than favouring a national, overall perspective. The questions of how uniform or diverse South African English is and how these relationships can be modelled are widely addressed in scholarship, including ongoing changes, as for example the recent emergence of a pan-ethnic middle class compromise variety described primarily by Rajend Mesthrie.