This chapter outlines the development of pidgin and creole varieties of English worldwide. The foundational assumption is that creole languages emerge from pidginized varieties or at least ones strongly shaped by second-language acquisition. As such, the Australian and Oceanic languages such as Tok Pisin and Australian Aboriginal English will be treated as creolizations of initial pidgins (rather than as “pidgins” themselves, as they often have been), as will the West African languages often called “pidgins” such as Nigerian and Cameroonian “Pidgin” English. The chapter will also treat the creoles of the Caribbean and surrounding area along with the aforementioned West African varieties as sister languages born of an ancestral pidgin. Hawaiian “Pidgin” English, including controversy over its origins, will also be covered, as well as Chinese Pidgin English and Pitkern/Norf’k.

This chapter describes the history and development of English in Nigeria. Starting from first contacts with English-speaking traders in the sixteenth century, English was firmly implanted in Nigeria with the establishment of schools and British colonial rule during the nineteenth century. By 1960, Nigeria gained independence from Britain, but due to the multilingual nature of the country and the prestige accorded to English by many speakers, English continues to function until today as the preferred language for official and formal contexts. In Nigeria, English co-occurs with Nigerian Pidgin and about five hundred indigenous Nigerian languages, which all have been shown to influence its use. This has resulted into the domestication and acculturation of English in Nigeria, leading to a distinctive variety of English called Nigerian English, which has characteristic lexical, phonological, morphosyntactic and discourse-pragmatic features and which can be divided into several sub-varieties based on speakers’ ethnicity and educational status.

Australia has a comparatively recent history of European settlement and English language development. Yet, it is already quite distinct. The different mixes of original dialects that came in during the early years, as well as the physical separation from other English-speaking regions, have allowed this distinctiveness to flourish. Regional variation within Australian English is still minor compared to other varieties, although local differences have been increasing. Contact with languages other than English has also been adding to the complex multilinguistic reality that is modern-day Australia. Recent years mark the rise of new multicultural identities for Australian English speakers in the form of migrant ethnolects and varieties of Aboriginal English. Such ethnically marked ways of speaking are no longer the consequence of second language learning but relate to attitudes around identity and cultural heritage.

Australian Aboriginal English (henceforth ‘AE’) is an enregistered contact-based variety spoken by over 80 per cent of First Nations people in Australia. AE has been observed to differ systematically from standardised Australian English across levels of linguistic structure, and is usually placed on a continuum ranging from ‘light’ (acrolectal) varieties to ‘heavy’ (basilectal) varieties. The ‘light’ varieties are closest to standardised Australian English; the ‘heavy’ varieties are sometimes closer to Kriol, an English-lexified creole language spoken across northern Australia. Across the continuum, AE is distinctive for its group focus and its cultural connection with storytelling. This chapter outlines some of the distinctive linguistic features of AE, embracing a culturally appropriate methodology in which a corpus of data from group sessions has been collected under First Nations leadership. The recordings capture speakers in their home settings mostly in ‘Nyungar country’, in the Southwest of Western Australia, and are based on ‘yarning’, a First Nations cultural form of storytelling and conversation. We discuss the ways that the yarns collected in our corpus have allowed us to hear the voices of those seldom included in linguistic research and how hearing these yarns is allowing us to tell a different story.

The current chapter describes the history and development of English in (what is today) Kenya and Tanzania from the earliest linguistic influences of colonial powers to the latest nation-specific developments in language policy and lexicon. Colonial history and national language policy in Tanzania and Kenya have resulted in Kiswahili becoming the national lingua franca, though to different degrees, and have so far impeded the development of a national variety of English in the general triglossic ecology of local languages, Kiswahili, and English. The African language substratum, almost completely Bantu in Tanzania but one-third Nilo-Saharan in Kenya, influences forms of English. In general, regional, national and subnational usage features can be distinguished, i.e. many (sub-)national features in pronunciation, some national and cultural features in the lexicon, and mainly regional (or universal L2 features) in grammar. Recent developments can be illustrated by examples from digital sources, especially online newspapers and social media.

The city-state of Singapore is officially quadrilingual (Malay, Mandarin, Tamil and English) and home to a diverse population. Colonised by Britain in 1819, English has since had a special place on the island. Initially confined to the elite, it soon became a desired commodity, learnt and acquired by different groups at different times, always in conjunction with the other languages with which it co-exists. As Singapore embarked on its path towards independence, English became a compulsory subject in education, and, in 1987, was made the sole medium of instruction. These developments resulted in large-scale language shift, with English now the majority language in Singaporean homes (2020 census). The local vernacular Singlish has its origin in this high-contact situation. It features influences primarily from Malay and southern Chinese. While it is regarded by policy-makers as undesirable, Singlish enjoys some acceptance in the population, not least as a marker of local identity.

English has become an important part of the linguistic repertoire of black South Africans. Education was important to nineteenth and twentieth century access to the language, first in mission schools and later under the apartheid government. In the post-apartheid phase, extensive diversification in experience yields native, cross-over and traditional Black South African English (BSAE) varieties of South African English (SAE). The phonology of traditional BSAE is characterised by the neutralisation of the tense/lax vowel contrast, the rarity of vowel reduction to schwa in unstressed syllables, a tendency towards syllable-timing, stress shifts to the penult and weight sensitivity to the final syllable, as well as the more extensive use of tone contrasts. Distinctive grammatical patterns include the use of the progressive aspect in an extended range of contexts to mean ongoing duration without a temporal limit, copy pronouns, the higher frequency of modal adverbials and some innovative collocations like can be able to. Lexical and semantic innovation occurs through loanwords reflecting ongoing social change in especially culture and politics, on top of older geographical borrowings, alongside semantic extension to capture locally relevant meanings beyond the conventional range of the same expressions in other varieties.

Sierra Leone is a centrepiece in the emergence of the Englishes and English-lexifier contact languages of West Africa. The movement of people of African origin from the Americas and other parts of West Africa to Freetown, the capital of Sierra Leone in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, established the English language and the English-lexifier creole language Krio in Sierra Leone, and thereafter, in West Africa. Krios founded communities in major towns along the West African coast in British-occupied West Africa. Sierra Leone English and Early Krio assumed central roles as inputs to all other Englishes and English-lexifier contact languages in West Africa. The English-lexifier contact languages that arose from the interaction of Krio founder communities with local populations are today used by up to one hundred and twenty million people across West Africa in varying degrees of nativization. This chapter provides an overview of the history, structure and trajectory of Sierra Leone English and Krio, and the impact of these two ‘Englishes’ on the linguistic ecology of West Africa in the present and future.

Over a half century of sociolinguistic work has addressed various aspects of the speech of African Americans, often called African American Language (AAL) or African American English (AAE). While linguists were studying AAL for educational and theoretical linguistic purposes, demographic changes in the United States, including the Great Migration of African Americans, in combination with long-standing segregation, were creating situations in urban environments that helped establish and fortify what we know of as AAL in twenty-first-century America. The current chapter focuses on the twentieth-century development of AAL, using evidence from the Corpus of Regional African American Language (CORAAL; Kendall and Farrington 2021), a publicly available corpus of conversational speech, with data from several African American communities, including the Lower East Side of New York City (Manhattan), Princeville, NC; Rochester, NY; Valdosta, GA; and Washington, DC, to highlight the influence of the Great Migration on AAL and the development of regional sound patterns.

Language change in American English started when the initial speakers of English landed in North America. During the foundational stage, founder dialects were established in regions such as Tidewater, Virginia, Boston, Philadelphia, Charleston and New Orleans, which still maintain distinct varieties. As migration patterns emerged, dialects expanded largely along an east-to-west route that is still evident to this day, but more recent changes have reflected different migratory routes, such as the south–north migration route of African Americans and the more recent movement of Northern transplants to large urban areas of the South. We consider recent shifts in vowel systems, including the development of vowels systems in the Northern Cities Vowel Shift, the Northern California Vowel Shift and the weakening of the Southern Vowel Shift in Southern metropolitan areas. Finally, we examine the intersection of social and interactional factors with socio-regional space as these factors have nuanced the advancement of change in progress.

This chapter examines Canadian English from a nationwide point of view, complementing the regional views of the following chapters in this part. It begins with a brief statement of the current demolinguistic status of Canadian English, then reviews the history of English-speaking settlement that led to its establishment, growth and geographic diffusion. This review supports a discussion of the relation between settlement history and the most important linguistic features of modern Canadian English, especially its phonetic and phonological characteristics. A particular focus is on the relative contributions of eighteenth-century American Loyalist settlement and early nineteenth-century British immigration, as well as the later diffusion of those features to Western Canada. Examples of regional variation in vocabulary and pronunciation are then briefly presented, before the chapter concludes with a selective review of previous research on Canadian English.

Taking as a point of departure the seminal study of Newfoundland English by William Kirwin (2001), the current chapter examines afresh the role of regional inputs from south-west England and south-east Ireland in determining the linguistic ecology of English in Newfoundland, Canada’s most easterly province. The chapter reassesses Kirwin’s achievement in identifying relevant dialectal input and offers a consideration of the sociolinguistic status of the early English speakers on the island and the development of independent forms of English with the advent of permanent settlement there. The geographical distribution of settlers also represents a focus with the concentration of speakers in the capital St John’s and on the surrounding parts of the Avalon Peninsula. Features from all linguistic levels – pronunciation, grammar and vocabulary – are scrutinised, with the examination of vocabulary resting on the Dictionary of Newfoundland English with a view to determining the probable British/Irish sources of Newfoundland-specific lexis, independent developments in this part of Canada notwithstanding.

While the origins of African American English (AAE) have been the focus of debate among linguists for nearly a century, such interest has been aimed primarily at the vernacular end of the continuum, with dialectologists pointing to the retention of features from early British English, while creolists trace the origins to a Gullah-like creole spoken on the US plantations. Though no consensus has been reached regarding the origins of African American Vernacular English (AAVE), a focus on the socio-historical evidence suggests that diverse ecological conditions likely yielded a range of linguistic outcomes within the context of the plantation economy. The modern-day development of African American Standard English (AASE), on the other hand, may be traced to the first half of the twentieth century, as the African American middle class emerged in racially segregated neighbourhoods, where increased economic opportunity was met by systemic efforts to disenfranchise upwardly mobile African Americans.

This chapter considers the English of the Southern United States with a focus on the ways in which past and present settlement histories, social structures and economic realities are reflected in the language and language variation of the region.  Despite persisting ideas of geographic and social insularity, the American South is a large region that has and has always contained great diversity. This chapter begins with identifying where is the American South, what are its subregions and what role regionality plays in variation. Further, we outline what are some of the traditional linguistic features that are associated with the South. A discussion of research into variation and how different social factors and groups follows. We conclude by looking forward to needed research.