This chapter first discusses the label ‘English as a second and foreign language’ and then gives a brief selective account of how English arrived in Africa and Asia and how it was initially taught and to whom. The work of three influential language teachers who worked in Asia – Palmer in Japan, Faucett in China and West in Bengal - is reviewed. The chapter then illustrates how local varieties of English have developed in postcolonial settings and how the use of English as a lingua franca has increased in countries that were not colonies of Britain or the United States. The current relevance of the terms English as a second or as a foreign language is questioned as it is argued that English now comprises a multitude of new varieties and plays a major role as the international lingua franca.

This chapter provides an overview of the evolution of English in Ghana. The absence of a sizable number of settlers, different language and education policies and sociodemographic developments have shaped the variety considerably. Real-time analyses of sociolinguistic and structural developments in the nativisation phase have become possible with the Historical Corpus of English in Ghana (HiCE Ghana), a 600,000-word corpus of Ghanaian English from the early stages of the nativisation phase. The Ghanaian component of the International Corpus of English (ICE) represents the late stages. Many lexical innovations were already deeply entrenched in the older data and Ghanaian English noun phrases have become more complex in line with predictions made by the Dynamic Model. The paper is rounded off with an outline of new diachronic approaches to Ghanaian English based on a corpus of material from the archives of the Ghana Broadcasting Corporation and an idea for a diachronic corpus of African newspapers.

This chapter traces the historical development of English in South Korea, which despite its long isolation and late contact with the language has turned into a fervent adopter of English as linguistic, symbolic, and economic capital. Particular focus lies on the history of English in the South Korean education system and the outcomes of the contact between Korean and English (i.e., Englishized Korean and Korean(ized) English). The United States Army Military Government in Korea (1945–1948) set the foundation for the compelling status of English in South Korea and the current chapter presents a case study of the language ideologies represented in three Korean English textbooks published during this period. While rudimentary notions of the ideologies of necessitation and externalization can already be found in the examined textbooks from the 1940s, all of the material was firmly grounded in the Korean context and clearly reflected the pro-American sentiments of the era.

The New Cambridge History of the English Language is aimed at providing a contemporary and comprehensive overiew of English, tracing its roots in Germanic and investigating the contact scenarios in which the language has been an active participant. It dis

The modern nation of Papua New Guinea is a colonial construct where English and its pidgin-creole daughter language, Tok Pisin, share an intertwined history and contemporary linguistic ecology, each with its official and unofficial roles and each influencing the other. Today at least half of all Papua New Guineans use Tok Pisin and/or English for day-to-day communication in this country with more than 840 distinct languages. Tok Pisin is the dominant medium of oral and informal communication, even as English remains the dominant medium of written and formal communication. The morphology and syntax of Tok Pisin show characteristics that are typical for the languages of its first speakers. Its lexicon is mainly English, but high-frequency words of German, Kuanua, and Chinese Pidgin origin are indicative of a complicated history. Papua New Guinea English has been heavily influenced by Tok Pisin.

This chapter surveys the history of China from the time of first contact with British traders in the early seventeenth century until the present. It traces the story of English through the era of pidgin English, to English language education in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, and recent policies in the People’s Republic of China. Since the opening of China in the late 1970s, English has been officially promoted as a key to modernisation. Today, official attitudes to the language seem to be less enthusiastic than the recent past, but, despite this, the popularity of learning English appears to be undiminished among China’s growing middle classes.

There has been unbroken Anglophone settlement of the Falkland Islands, a British Overseas Territory in the South Atlantic, since 1833. The current chapter begins with an overview of the islands’ settlement and socio-economic history, taking into consideration migration from the English South-West and the Scottish Highlands, contact in the nineteenth century with Spanish-speaking gauchos, twentieth century population decline and the aftermath of the brief 1982 conflict with Argentina, since which both the population and the economy of the islands have picked up in sociolinguistically consequential ways. The chapter then provides a detailed overview of the phonology, morphosyntax and lexis of contemporary Falkland Island English, based on a near-million word corpus of spoken conversational data collected by Andrea Sudbury in the late 1990s and Hannah Hedegard in early 2020. This description represents, therefore, an update from earlier accounts (e.g. Britain and Sudbury 2010, 2013; Sudbury 2000, 2001, 2004), given our analysis of a very recently collected new corpus.

This chapter provides an account of the types of contact and spread associated with the growth of English beyond the United Kingdom. It describes the main linguistic outcomes of these contacts, including pidgins, creoles, English as a second language (ESL), English as a Foreign Language (EFL), English as Lingua Franca (ELF), Immigrant Englishes and hybridities arising from code-switching and electronic and social media. It also gives an account of how different scholars have tried to make sense of the immense variety within ‘the English language complex’. Particular attention is paid to Kachru’s Three Circles model, Schneider’s Dynamic Model and its current refinements, Mair’s World System for Englishes, Mesthrie’s Contact-Contingency model, and insights from Corpus Linguistics, Language Contact and Language Ecology.

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.

This chapter provides a description of two language varieties spoken in Hawai‘i: Pidgin, an English-based creole, known exonymically as Hawai‘i Creole, and Hawai‘i English, the regional variety of English spoken in Hawai‘i. While Pidgin and Hawai‘i English are treated here as separate entities, we also acknowledge the continuum between them. Our description of linguistic variation in both varieties is based on analysis of speech from informal interviews. We present findings from work that examines variation in linguistic forms, including postvocalic /r/, and we focus especially on variation among vowels. The acoustic analysis of over 8,000 tokens of monophthongs has allowed us to examine and discuss how the vowels of Hawai‘i English and Pidgin have changed over time.

This chapter presents an overview of various issues related to English in Pakistan. A timeline of the language and education policy for English highlights notable events from the day of independence to the twenty-first century. Pakistani English is mostly used in the written medium though spoken and spoken-like written mediums on the internet are also emerging. The review of attitudinal research shows that generally students and other concerned groups of the society have a pragmatic view of accepting English. In terms of language features, Pakistani English has developed many distinctive features at various linguistic levels. There is also extensive language contact happening between English and regional languages, where both sides borrow from each other. Lastly, the review of various aspects of English in Pakistan presented in this paper shows that English might be in a stable state in Pakistan, at least for now.

There are similarities in the historical development of English in Brunei and Malaysia, two countries that share many socio-cultural and linguistic traits; yet at the same time, differences in the educational policies that have been adopted have seen English promoted more consistently in Brunei, while support for English-medium education in Malaysia has fluctuated in recent decades, and this has resulted in a substantial divergence in the current status of English in the two countries. This chapter describes the historical development of English in Brunei and Malaysia, traces changes in educational policy over the past few decades, discusses the current status of English, provides an overview of some of the features of Brunei English and Malaysian English, gives a snapshot of local literature in English, and finally offers a brief prognosis for the future of English in the two countries.

Namibia has long been a stepchild of World Englishes research despite an increasing influence of English in the country. The current chapter is one of the first to introduce Namibian English (NamE) to a wider collection of World Englishes. It outlines its unprecedented emergence and development and offers an overview of the latest research findings on language attitudes and use, identity conceptions related to the English language, as well as local characteristics of NamE. Most importantly, the chapter highlights two aspects of NamE. First of all, it outlines NamE’s heterogeneous character, i.e. the existence of a number of subvarieties of NamE. Second, the chapter emphasizes its independent character and claims that it should be treated as a variety of English in its own right and not just an offshoot of South African English. Even though the last ten years have produced an impressive surge of interest into the variety and thus important research findings, research on NamE is still in its infancy. The current contribution is, hopefully, the starting point for a more thorough integration into the World Englishes paradigm.