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The Spread and Diversification of
the English Language
English: One Tongue, Many Voices
English: The Working Tongue of the Global Village
The world is considered a "global village" and English is the working tongue of this global village. English is used as an additional language by many more people around the globe. Non-native speakers outnumber native speakers. Just 5 languages are spoken by more than half of the world's population: English, Chinese, Spanish, Russian, and Hindi. English today is big business and the most commonly taught foreign language all over the world. Language is a set of different skills and a lifelong process; it is learned through practice. The distinction between "English speakers" and "users of the language" is important.
The Three-Circle Model of World Englishes
The most influential model for grouping the varieties of English in the world is the Three-circle Model of World Englishes. This model describes the spread of English in terms of three concentric circles: The Inner Circle The Outer Circle The Expanding Circle
The Inner Circle
Refers to the traditional bases of English, dominated by the mother- tongue varieties. English acts as a first language. It includes three geographical blocs: the New World (the United States, Canada, and the West Indies), Europe (the United Kingdom and Ireland), and the Southern Hemisphere (New Zealand and South Africa). Some countries in the Inner Circle have more than one first language, like Canada (bilingual) and South Africa (11 official languages). The users are also called L1 users or ENL users (English as a Native Language), numbering around 500 million people. People born in the Inner Circle enjoy a privilege as they learn to speak this global language as part of the normal process of child language acquisition.
In English-speaking communities, there is a widespread lack of enthusiasm for learning other languages.
The Outer Circle
Consists of the earlier phases of the spread of English in non-native settings. The language has become part of a country's chief institutions and plays an important second language role. English is an official language and widely used in administration, education, and the media. The Outer Circle mostly includes countries that were former British or American colonies, such as Kenya, Ghana, Pakistan, Malaysia, and Singapore. The users are also called L2 users or ESL users (English as a Second Language), numbering around 600 million people.
The Expanding Circle
Refers to the territories where English is learned as a foreign language because it is found useful in many contexts, such as education, technology, sport, tourism, business, and industry. In this circle, we find people who live in countries like China, Japan, Greece, and Poland. The users are also called L3 users or EFL users (English as a Foreign Language), numbering over 1 billion people. This circle seems to be ever-expanding, and it may soon be more appropriate to rename it as the "Expanded Circle."
Do We Need a World Language?
There has never been a situation where one language could claim global currency. To overcome the confusion of tongues, people have tried in the past to make up artificial international languages, such as Esperanto (the most successful), Interglossa, and Interlingua. The grammar of artificial languages has been planned to be regular and easy to learn, and their vocabulary combines elements from different languages, but these advantages have not outweighed the advantages of a natural language. A natural language offers a cultural milieu and a rich canon of literature.
What Made English the World Language?
English did not become a world language solely due to its own linguistic merits. English is considered a world language for several factors: The expansion and influence of British colonial power The status of the US as the leading economic, military, and scientific power of the 20th century
Some Celtic leaders decided to ask for help from Germanic people (who lived just across the North Sea). These semi-pirates expelled the enemies of the Britons but then turned their weapons against their hosts. From the middle of the 5th century and for the next 100 years or so, waves of migrating tribes brought their Germanic dialects to Britain. These tribes are the Angles, Saxons, Jutes, and Frisians. There was no sense of national identity among these tribes, but they were able to communicate with each other. Anglo-Saxon is the term used to denote anything related to English soil before the Norman conquest; it's a convenient label to distinguish them from the "Old Saxons" who remained on the continent. Very old Celtic words survived the invasions and left their imprint on modern English, such as names of places and rivers. Celtic people were expelled, and the Britons gradually became absorbed by the Germanic population. Old English is the language of the Anglo-Saxons (450-1150).
Christianity in the Isles
Christianity was introduced into Britain in Roman times by the 3rd century. Constantine the Great was the man who officially converted the Roman Empire to Christianity. However, the Germanic tribes were pagans, and the Christian faith was maintained only in the Celtic areas (Cornwall and Wales), from where it was carried to the Island of Iona and to the kingdom of Northumbria. In 596, Pope Gregory 1st sent a group of missionaries to convert to Christianity the Anglo-Saxons living in Britannia. The kingdom of Kent was swiftly converted (Augustine: 1st archbishop of Canterbury). Latin was the language of the Church, and the missionaries promoted literacy and translations from Latin into the native tongue. A number of Christian ideas needed to be explained in simple terms to the new converts, such as Evangelium (= godspel -> gospel) and Dominus (= hlafweard -> Lord). There have been recorded some 400 Latin words in Old English introduced as a result of the spread of Christianity, such as candela (OE: candel, ME: candle) and diabolus (OE: deofol, ME: devil).
The Viking Age (793-1042)
In 793, strange-looking ships were sighted out on the North Sea: they were the Vikings. Vikings marked the Anglo-Saxons' territories by destroying them, but they were also colonists and traders. At the beginning, the word "Viking" was used to indicate brutal and unpleasant characters, but later, it changed its meaning to those Scandinavian invaders. For 3 generations after the raids began, the bands of Vikings arrived mostly as separate and small-scale undertakings, not as royal expeditions or large invasions.
There were 3 phases of Viking activities (250 years): Sporadic raids (793-865): the attacks were basically hit-and-run affairs, but from 835, raids became more intense. Permanent colonization (865-896): by the early 870s, only the kingdom of Wessex remained intact. King Alfred of Wessex managed to roll back the Danish tide and reached an agreement with the Viking leader Guthrum to confine the Danes to the north and east (Danelaw area). Political supremacy (years up to 1014): King Sveinn of Denmark arrived with a Viking army for the conquest of the kingdom. After his death, the throne of England eventually passed to his son, King Canute, who maintained peace in the country. After Canute's death (1035), Denmark and England again became separate kingdoms, and in 1042, the old House of Wessex was able to return to power, marking the end of Scandinavian influence in England (politically, not linguistically). The Vikings spoke dialects of Old Norse (ON), the parent language of modern Danish, Swedish, Norwegian, and Icelandic. The Anglo-Saxons spoke dialects of Old English (OE), the language from the middle of the 5th to the beginning of the 12th century. OE and ON were related Germanic languages, and many words were identical or similar. About 1,000 words in Modern English can be traced back to ON origin, such as lake, gate, and husband. Some Middle English words have doublets, often with different meanings, where one word comes from OE (craft, ill, shirt) and the other from ON (skill, sick, skirt).
The Norman Influence
In the early 10th century, the Carolingian king Charles the Simple had given the title of Duke to the son of a Norwegian earl. The Latin scribes called his dukedom Normandia: "the land of Norsemen." So the Vikings brought not only their own language but also the French language to England.
Old English Before the Norman Conquest
We can hardly speak of an "English language" before the time of King Alfred (9th century). Old English is a collection of dialects: West Saxon, Mercian, Northumbrian, and Kentish. The most important dialect was West Saxon. Until the 9th century, there existed no official written standard, but the West Saxon variety became a standard form of Old English that spread to other parts of the country. We have some texts written in Old English that have survived, such as the Lord's Prayer, some of whose words are identical to Middle English ones. Germanic tribes used an ancient alphabet called runes, which was replaced from 600 A.D. by the Roman Alphabet, with a few additions ( letters that we don't use today). Over time, the grammar became simpler, with the loss of final syllables, for example.
Henry IV (1399-1413) was the first king of England since the Norman invasion to speak English as his first language, which originated a series of doublets (e.g., difficult - hard, ball - sphere).
Henry V (1413-1422) further promoted the spread of English, marking the transition to the Middle English period (1150-1450).
Middle English: The Linguistic Transition
During the Middle English period, there was not only a standard language, but also various "Middle Englishes."
Middle English incorporated elements of Norman French, Danish, and Latin.
The transition from Old English to Middle English was gradual, but the years between 1100 and 1500 saw a revolutionary change.
Influx of French Words
Up to the middle of the 13th century, around 900 French words came into the English language. The majority of French loans appeared during the 14th and 15th centuries. By the end of the Middle English period, French words numbered at least 25,000. At the beginning of this period, about 90% of the vocabulary was Germanic, but by the end, it was around 75%. The French borrowings covered a large number of lexical fields, such as administration, religion, military, fashion, and education. In medieval English society, the use of the French language was mainly restricted to the upper classes. Often, when a French word was adopted, the native English word was not abandoned, resulting in many present-day English doublets where one word is Romance and the other Germanic. When the two words express the same meaning, a choice between them usually has a stylistic effect, with the Romance word being more formal or abstract and the Germanic word feeling more homely and direct.
Grammatical Endings Disappear
The inflectional system of grammatical endings was reduced and simplified. Old English had a complicated system of case endings, similar to modern German. This transition represented the major grammatical change in the structure of the language. The simplification of the grammatical system was likely due to the influence of the Vikings, who did not worry about getting all word endings right in order to make themselves understood.
Geoffrey Chaucer and William Caxton
Geoffrey Chaucer is considered the father of English literature. In the 1380s, he started to write his most famous work, The Canterbury Tales (which remained unfinished).
In Chaucer's time, a standard written form of the language, known as Chancery English, began to emerge.
In 1476, the introduction of printing in England by William Caxton set the stage for the standardization of the language.
Caxton produced the first two books printed in English, including a translation from French. By the time of his death in 1491, Caxton had published nearly 80 printed works in English, including Chaucer's The Canterbury Tales. Caxton had to make a historic decision on how to "define the English language," as Middle English had numerous different spellings recorded for the same word, with a mixture of Old English and French systems. From the beginning of the printing age, a trend towards a more fixed and consistent spelling is perceptible, although it was not until the later 18th century that English had reached the stage of a fully standardized spelling. The point in the history of the English language when printed books from Caxton's press were distributed throughout the country can be used to mark the end of the Middle English period and the beginning of Modern English.
Timeline
Fifth century: Germanic tribes sail across the North Sea, marking the beginning of the English language. End of eighth century: Vikings begin to sail west from Scandinavia to the Isles, leaving permanent linguistic traces on English from their Nordic tongues. 1066: Normans invaded England, and Romance words began to outnumber Germanic words.
The Rise of English as the Dominant
Language
The Restoration and the Codification of English
By the Restoration, the written language was becoming the dominant voice in learning and literature, replacing Latin with English. Writers became more grammar-conscious and more critical of "incorrect" usage, as a great national language needed to be codified by rules in grammars and dictionaries.
However, for the role of English today as a world language, the single most important historical factor was the coming of the English language to America.
The Establishment of English in America
Towards the end of the 16th century, Shakespeare wrote his first plays, Queen Elizabeth I reigned over a few million subjects, and England was a naval power. In 1584, there was the first expedition to the New World, led by Sir Walter Raleigh, but all three of his expeditions failed. In 1603, Queen Elizabeth I died, and her crown passed to James I (King of Scotland). In 1607, the first permanent English settlement, Jamestown (in Virginia), was established, where English first took root in America. Most of the settlers came from the south-west of England, but they died in the first year, and the experiment failed.
The Pilgrim Fathers and the Mayflower Compact
In November 1620, a ship named Mayflower reached land in what is now Massachusetts, with the first group of English Puritans on board. Before disembarking, all the men signed a document drafted by the leaders of the enterprise, promising obedience to the laws and ordinances - the Mayflower Compact. This was the first effort to establish formal self-government in the New World. In 1629, the settlement in Plymouth became part of Massachusetts Bay Colony. New England is the name by which we all know the colonies because every colonist came from England.
The First Americanisms
By April 1621, when Mayflower set sail back to England, only 54 people were still alive. They had to learn how to grow a crop which they called maize, now known in America as corn - this is the first Americanism. After the first harvest, Governor Bradford proclaimed the day of thanksgiving: Thanksgiving Day (4th November) is the most important national holiday in the US. Later than the arrival of the colonists, the number of indigenous populations had been reduced: The massacre of the American indigenous population. The term "Indians" was replaced by "Native Americans". In this occasion, 60 language families have been reduced to 35.
Linguistic Variety and Uniformity in the United States
The setting of the US with immigrant peoples falls into three periods: the colonial period (Jamestown 1607 – end of colonial times 1790), the
national expansion period (the expansion of the original 13 States from 1790 to 1865), and the third period (from the end of the American Civil War 1865 to 1929, when the immigration laws were changed). In the first two periods, the majority of the newcomers were slaves from Africa or free immigrants from the British Isles and the countries of Northern Europe. In the third period, the majority came from Southern and Eastern Europe. The first period was the most important for English language's developments in America; the later immigrants had to learn English as a foreign language. At the time of the American Revolution, the majority of English speakers still lived in the British Isles. A century later, the largest English-speaking population was in North America, and now 2/3 of native speakers of English speak with an American accent.
American Voices - A Preview
In the traditional division, there are three main regional accents in the US: the North-eastern accent (spoken in New England and New York State, not including NYC - non-rhotic), the Southern accent (spoken from Virginia down to Texas - non-rhotic and diphthongizing tendency), and General American (GA) (the term usually used for what is spoken in the rest of the country by most Americans - the pronunciation has no marked regional characteristics, and it is somewhat comparable to RP in Britain, but it has no significant connotation of eliteness). Another term sometimes used is Network English, referring to the relatively region-neutral accent heard in broadcasting.
The American Revolution and the Identity of American
English
The American Revolution (1775-1783) was the insurrection through which 13 of Great Britain's North American colonies threw off British rule to establish the sovereign United States of America, founded with the Declaration of Independence in 1776 adopted by George Washington and drafted by Thomas Jefferson. The mother tongue could not be sent back to the mother country, but there was also a general notion that English in America should be improved and perfected and give its own identity. John Adams proposed an academy to maintain the good health of the language, however, there is no academy in the US with an official brief to regulate American English. The term "Yankee" is the first recorded in 1765 as a name for an inhabitant of New England, and its use by the British to refer to Americans in general first appears in the 1780s.
The Frontier Moves Further West
After the Revolution, the government of the New Nation encouraged expansion, and the frontier moved further west.
Gilbert took possession of St John's, establishing there the first English- speaking colony in North America. In 1534, Jacques Cartier (a French sailor) crossed the Atlantic and claimed land for France, finding the Gulf of Saint Lawrence - Canada. The name Canada comes from the Iroquoian word Kanata, that means "village" or "community". In 1663, Canada became a royal province, and many French settlers were sent there. In 1670, the English Crown took interest in this area and granted the Hudson's Bay Company. French explorers and colonizers introduced new words like "prairie", "levee", "bateau", and "voyageur". In 1763, the Treaty of Paris ended the Seven Years' War, with Britain taking possession of Canada. Canada became a British colony, and this victory had three results: it weakened the American colonies' dependence on Britain, the British took over and expanded the Canadian fur trade, and Britain possessed a colony populated almost entirely by people of French descent.
The Loyalists' Influence
At the time of the American Revolution (1775-1783), not all Americans supported the cause of independence: the ones who favoured the British side were called Loyalists. Many of them decided to move to Canada, settling first in Nova Scotia. In 1776, 40,000 loyalists fled to Canada. The colony was divided into Upper Canada, dominated by English- speaking colonists, and Lower Canada, inhabited mainly by French- speaking colonists. In 1867, the Confederation made Canada a self-governing state with four provinces (Ontario, Quebec, New Brunswick, and Nova Scotia). Canada achieved independence in 1931 but still belongs to the Commonwealth of Nations, under the British Crown.
Canadian English
The standard accents of English spoken in Canada and the United States are similar but not identical.
In linguistic terms, Canadian English is a variety of the larger entity, Northern American English.
The pronunciation of English in Canada is closer to American than British English, but the most striking thing about Canadian English is its homogeneity.
Canadian pronunciation resembles the General American pronunciation (GA) in the US:
Canadians usually pronounce r in words such as "heard" and "higher", and words like "dance" and "bath" have a vowel /æ/.
t is pronounced as /D/ between the vowels and after /r/ (tapping), so "butter" sounds like "budder". Pairs such as "cot" and "caught", "awful" and "offal", "caller" and "collar", are pronounced with the same /ɑ/ vowel-sound.
In words ending with -ory (e.g., "laboratory") and -ary (e.g., "secretary"), most Canadians pronounce the -tory or -tary part as two syllables.
There are some items that show some ways in which Canadian pronunciation differs from the GA:
Most Canadians pronounce the name of the letter Z as in BrE /zed/ not / zi:/. There are some words where Canadian English shows divided usage, preferring either the American or British model.
Canadian raising, a special pronunciation which occurs in diphthongs before a voiceless consonant.
In Canadian spelling, both American and British forms are found. American spelling is more common in newspapers, while British spelling often appears in textbooks and learned journals.
There is a little word "eh" (pronounced /ei/) that is considered to be a marker of Canadian speech.
English Transplanted
By 1783, the 13 colonies in America were lost for Britain.
English language spread to other continents: Australia, Africa, and Asia.
The original inhabitants of Australia are the Australian Aborigines, who have the longest continuous cultural history in the world.
The first known Europeans to reach the continent we now call Australia were Portuguese and Dutch sailors in the 16th century.
Initially, it was known as "Nova Hollandia" ("New Holland"); the name "Australia" is derived from Latin "terra australis incognita" ("unknown southern land").
In 1768, James Cook was sent on a scientific expedition to the Pacific. He navigated the coast of New Holland and he claimed it for Great Britain with the name of New South Wales.
The First Fleet
In 1788, 11 British ships (The First Fleet) anchored in Botany Bay, on the eastern coast of Australia.
The 1st Aboriginal loanword in English was "kangaroo". Most Aboriginal loanwords refer to Australia's flora and fauna, like "budgerigar" (the yellow-green parrot), "dingo" (the wild dog), the "koala" and the kingfisher "kookaburra".
Some place names come from the Aboriginal too (e.g., "Wagga Wagga" or "Indooroopilly").
But the white settlement was disastrous for the Aborigines and for their language. Today, most of them speak English too.
Australian English
Considering its geographical spread, Australian English is remarkably uniform, and the variations of accents are socially or ethnically rather than geographically determined.
Some vowel sounds come from Cockney or "London vernacular".
The differences between Australian speech and standardized British pronunciation (RP) are:
In words such as "say" and "Australia", the diphthong is a wider sound pronounced close to /ai/ where RP has /ei/. In words such as "now", where RP has /aʊ/, the diphthong approximates to /æʊ/ or /ɛə/. In words such as "father", where RP has /'fɑ:ɗə/, Australians say /'fa:ɗə/. RP vowels /i:/ and /u:/ are often pronounced as diphthongs, so that "see" and "do" resemble /sɪə/ and /dəʊ/. Some vowels are pronounced with the tongue higher than in RP, e.g., "pen" /pɪn/. In words like "happy", the final -y is pronounced /i/ in RP, but in Australian English more like a long vowel /'hæpi:/.
The most common vowel in English, the unstressed schwa vowel /ə/, is more generally used than in RP.
The vocabulary of Australian English tends to be colloquial and informal. The language is full of imaginative, colorful, and fun expressions.
Typical of colloquial Australian English are shortened words, such as "beaut" for "beautiful", including words ending in the suffix -o or -y/-ie like "arvo" for "afternoon" and "tinnie" for "a can of beer".
The Australian settlers came across a wild nature completely different from the English landscape, so they gave them new meanings. Today there are more than 10,000 English words with an Australian origin or meaning.
Some Australianisms are "barbie" for "barbecue", "footpath" for "pavement", and "weekender" for "a holiday cottage".
New Zealand - Aotearoa
Southeast from Australia, there is New Zealand, taking the name from the Dutch province Zeeland, but it is also known as "Aotearoa" ("land of the long white cloud"), a native Maori name for these islands.
The Maori population had been living there for at least 600 years before the arrival of the settlers from the northern hemisphere.
James Cook claimed in 1769 New Zealand for the British Crown, and he was the 1st to use Maori words in written English, some of them becoming later part of the general vocabulary of New Zealanders.
New Zealand was never a penal colony, and many people from Britain and from the higher social strata arrived there.
After the discovery of gold in 1861, there was also a great influx of Australians.
In the 1870s, the population doubled, most of all from southern England.
By the 1890s, the language began to crystallize, and it was very close to Australian English.
When Europeans arrived, they encountered Maori, a Polynesian language totally different from English. Many names of places are coming from Maori.
At the beginning of the 20th century, the Maori population was declining, and the English one increased.
Since 1987, the Maori language has had official status alongside English. Loanwords from Maori refer to trees, flowers, animals, or traditional indigenous culture.
A considerable number of Maori words have entered the New Zealand English vocabulary: most refer to flora, fauna, and place-names, such as "kiwi", the symbol of New Zealand, used to indicate the bird, the fruit, and also for the New Zealanders themselves.
New Zealand English
In New Zealand, the English language comes under a crossfire from four directions: British, American, Australian English, and Maori language.
The English language took root from 1820, with the 1st organized immigration of British settlers in the Eastern Cape. Most of them came from the rural south-east of England.
In 1822, the governor Somerset made English the only official language of the Cape and tried to anglicize the Afrikaners.
A second group of English speakers arrived in the middle of the 18th century and settled in Natal, beyond the borders of the Cape. They differed from the 1st group, they represented the high social strata, and the majority came from the North of England; they occasionally could go back home and renew contract, so they maintained their accents.
Nowadays, we can see a distinction between Cape English, Natal English, and General South African English:
The first two are like the North-eastern and the Southern accents of the US because they reflect English-speaker settlement area.
The third is less regionally specific.
A sub-variety of South African English is the Indian one because in the 1860s, British settlers in Natal imported some Indian laborers to work in their plantations.
In the last quarter of the century, the number of immigrants from Britain raised, and English became the dominant language in the mining communities.
The Dutch spoken at the beginning evolved into another language called Afrikaans, and both English and Afrikaans were official languages.
After WW1, Afrikaners were dominating South Africa, however, there was a dual language policy.
In 1961, South Africa became a republic and a member of the British Commonwealth of Nations.
From 1948 to 1994, South Africa was racially segregated under a system called "apartheid" ("separateness").
Nelson Mandela was the first black president of the Republic of South Africa.
The linguistic situation changed:
There are eleven official languages. Even if English is the language of a minority in South Africa, it is still the language of the government, business, higher education, and media.
The majority of Afrikaans is the mother tongue or second language for several million people in Southern Africa.
There are many reasons for English's success in South Africa:
It's a neutral solution. It helps kids in education more than Afrikaans because it's a language that can be useful for their future.
Features
Some words of South African entered the international English vocabulary: "trek" ("a journey by ox wagon"), "spoor" ("a track, trail, scent"), and "blesbok" ("a South African antelope").
Some features of native-speaker English pronunciation as encountered in South Africa: 1. As in AustE and NZE, the vowel of "pan" is raised to something like RP "pen", and the vowel of "pen" is raised further to something like RP "pin". 2. The short vowel /i/ in some cases is like the AustE and in others like NZE, depending on the neighboring consonants. 3. As in North America, the t in words like "matter" sounds like d ("madder").
English in South Africa
The Influence of South-Eastern British English
Like Australian English (AustE) and New Zealand English (NZE), the pronunciation of the long vowel /u:/ in South African English resembles the French one or the German ü.
This common ground with AustE and NZE is because of the influence of South-eastern British English of the 19th century.
English in the Outer Circle
In South Africa, English of the Inner Circle (native varieties) and English of the Outer Circle (non-native varieties) meet in one country.
The colonization of Africa began in the late 19th century, and by 1914, only Ethiopia and Liberia remained independent.
After World War II, the European colonial powers were weakened, and African colonies gradually won their independence (e.g., the Gold Coast became the Republic of Ghana, the first nation in sub-Saharan Africa to win independence, in 1957).
Varieties of African English
African English can be subdivided into three categories: West African English (Gambia, Ghana, Sierra Leone, Cameroon, and Nigeria) East African English (Kenya, Tanzania, Uganda, and possibly Sudan and Somalia)
