What's Your English?

Varieties of English Around the World


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.

Introduction

The English language is one of the few ones that are spoken in a great number of countries. In the case of English, those countries tend to be quite distant from one another. Some of them have enjoyed long times of independent development, as the United States, others saw their national language being replaced by English because of the lack of independent development, as e.g. Ireland. It may not be confusing that the way the language of England is used nowadays in all those different countries is not the same as in the mother country, whose Standard is taught in most countries, where English functions as a second language in school. Some differences may come from speech habits that got out of fashion in England, but remained in those regions far from the cultural centre of London. Others can be based on the substratum of the former language of the country.

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© bey Johannes Reese, March 1993
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