The following article is a term paper of a seminar on The English Language offered to second-year students at the Osnabrück University, Lower Saxony, Germany.
It describes the slight differences as to which Standard English varies across the world. At the end of the 20th century, it can be regarded as the most wide-spread language of the world. There are more than 50 legally independent states in the world, where it functions as official language. Out of those, there is even a number of states, where it is also used for every-day conversations. This is a very new phenomenon. In most pre-modern societies, languages tended to diverse quite fast, spreading into a large number of different dialects, which often lost mutual intellegibility and developed into diverging sound and morphosyntactic systems. As a standard, every rural village and every town tended to have its own language.
Since colonial times, a new development has arisen. Imperialistic states carried their language out of their countries and established it in their colonies. And it was their Standard variety that they carried out. This is how first in times, languages can be found that differ very little across space. As for English, there a two linguistic kinds of former colonies: those that adopted English as an official language with no impact on every-day life, and those that were settled by people from the Isles, and that grew to be English-speaking in every sense of the word. These countries whose colloquial language shows only slight deviation from Standard English as it is taught in school are the topic of this paper.