The colonial period, roughly between 1600 and 1900, saw an unprecedented movement of speakers of English to locations overseas. The reasons for this movement vary considerably, from deportation of prisoners and political opponents to voluntary emigration by groups with economic motives, sometimes mixed with religious ones. The rise of first-language overseas varieties depends heavily on the founder generation and the sociolinguistic scenarios they found themselves in. In addition, many countries have second-language varieties which in general have arisen through an English-oriented educational system and, previously, through contact in colonies with English speakers.

The current chapter explores English in Japan from four perspectives: (i) Japan’s sociopolitical history, which explains how English first entered the country in the early seventeenth century; (ii) Japan’s history of English language education, which presents a vexed problem; (iii) English loanwords that have entered the Japanese lexicon and which are divided into “pure” and “creative” borrowings; and (iv) the English used by Japanese speakers. The conclusion draws attention to the creativity of L2 users.

We present here the historical development of English across Micronesia, as well as a brief description of the Englishes spoken in the seven nations and territories that occupy this part of the Northern Pacific Ocean: the Federated States of Micronesia, Guam, Kiribati, the Marshall Islands, Nauru, the Northern Mariana Islands and Palau. The area has a complex colonial history, with Spain, Germany, Japan, the United States, the United Kingdom, Australia and New Zealand all implicated at different times, in different places and in different ways. The impact of English, therefore, is variable across Micronesia. We begin, therefore, by plotting a history of English across the region before presenting descriptions of the phonology, morphosyntax and lexis of the Englishes of Micronesia, balancing a focus on individual varieties, on the one hand, with an attempt at a unified account on the other, considering what the varieties share and what keeps them distinct.

Sri Lankan English is a postcolonial English in South Asia with its origins dating back to the end of the eighteenth century. Its evolution is reflected in a plethora of unique English-language structures and distinct quantitative preferences. Against the background of its historical development, this chapter provides an overview of the local features of Sri Lankan English in its sound system, lexis, syntax and semantics, but also points out that Sri Lankan English features traces of pragmatic nativisation. The documentation of the structural and pragmatic emancipation of Sri Lankan English from its historical input variety of British English is framed by sociolinguistic findings about speaker groups and domains associated with English as well as about attitudes towards different varieties of English. Together with a global account of Sri Lankan English from both formal and sociolinguistic perspectives, this chapter considers potential epicentral constellations among South Asian Englishes.

The current chapter provides a historical sociolinguistic overview of English in Zimbabwe. It challenges anachronistic descriptive taxonomies that in colonial times aligned ‘L1 English’ with the variety spoken by white English-speaking monolinguals and ‘L2 English’ with black multilinguals for whom English might be a second, third or even fourth spoken language and stereotypically, assumed to be marked by pronunciation and grammatical features from the background language(s). This chapter describes varieties of English in the Zimbabwe setting at the levels of morphosyntax, phonology, lexis and discourse in both spoken and written contexts, drawing both upon the research literature and the author’s own corpus of conversational and interview speech of Zimbabweans of a range of ages, ethnicities, educational, socio-economic and language backgrounds. The chapter presents English in Zimbabwe as a collection of varieties and repertoires, performed contingently depending upon such factors as ethnicity and race, time, audience, ideology, rural-urban divide, socio-economic conditions and education.

This chapter surveys the origins and history of English in the South Atlantic Ocean, on Tristan da Cunha, St Helena and the Falkland Islands, from the late sixteenth century to the present day. Their evolution is a showcase scenario of contact and koinéization in that a substantial stock of British settlers had permanent contact with speakers of other languages or forms of English as a Second Language. There were concomitant cases of dialect contact, input from restructured varieties (possibly Portuguese Creoles), African languages, as well as interaction as a group of St Helenians cross-migrated to Tristan da Cunha. The community’s founders found themselves in tabula rasa conditions and had no contact with pre-existing varieties. The varieties formed ab ovo via direct contact of the inputs brought to the islands, enabling the reconstruction of social factors and population dynamics at work during the development of overseas Englishes.

This chapter provides a detailed description of the socio-historical background of English in Fiji, Samoa and the Cook Is lands discussing the spread of English from the first contact with English explorers and traders to the impact of English after political (semi-)independence. It further includes the first real-time study on language variation and change from the Cook Islands. Three Cook Island women of three generations were recorded twice within 10 years. Comparing intra- and inter-speaker variation in terms of lexis, grammar and accent features, the study shows differences between the three individuals, which opens up a debate on the role of the individual in language change and the future of L2 Englishes in the South Pacific. The chapter confirms that empirical diachronic research on English in the South Pacific yields insights into variety formation.

This chapter provides an overview of Indian South African English, which remains an important ethnolect within South Africa, since language shift has resulted in the Indian population having English as its L1 (with the exception of new post-1994 migrants from India). Yet SAIE remains culturally distinct and in turning into an L1, SAIE has not jettisoned the L2 features of three to four decades ago, when shift was at its peak. This position aligns SAIE with Irish English as “language shift varieties”. The L2-features-turned-L1 illustrated in this chapter do not occur as frequently as in the 1970s and 1980s. Many speakers are now polystylistic (in either a general South African English or even an acrolectal standard variety tied slightly more to international than White South African English). However, the former L2 features do surface in the most informal end of the stylistic continuum, especially in in-group speech, as illustrated in this chapter.