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.

This chapter illustrates how gender is integral to Pater’s aesthetic philosophy and its subversive potential. It explains that renewal and rebirth were strongly gendered concepts in the Victorian period, showing that Pater’s understanding of sex and gender form a vital basis for the aesthetic philosophy he constructs across his literary oeuvre, a basis that revolves around metaphors of pregnancy and childbirth. It then develops an examination of how Pater reworks traditional Victorian gender categories to his ideas of renaissance and aestheticism in two sections: first, it shows how Pater’s concept of the renaissance is defined by a consistent metaphor of female reproductive biology, with attention to his figures of Demeter, Persephone, and Mona Lisa; second, it shows how Pater’s male figures create aesthetic meaning for these matrilineal cycles, with attention to Plato.

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.

This chapter explores two subfields of nineteenth-century horticultural practice – plant miniaturization and plant assimilation – to demonstrate indirect approaches to addressing botanical agency. Given differences of lifespan, size, cognition, and communication, as well as the distance of time, Victorian writing requires this indirect approach. In the case of plant miniaturization (bonsai), described admiringly in British travel narratives but bemoaned by champions of native plant life from William Wordsworth to H. Rider Haggard, writerly attention or disregard to plant suffering illuminates broader concerns of plant emotion and subjectivity. In the case of plant assimilation or its amplified parallel, plant invasiveness, human framings of plant reproduction point out the cultural constraints on plant life. When named plants reproduce across the page as well as through the garden bed, their taxonomic and vernacular incursions into nineteenth-century poetry and prose show a further assertion of expanded plant influence on the Victorian reading mind.

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.

This chapter focuses on Pater as a classicist, placing his writings on the classical world and mythology in the context of the changing face of classical education at his contemporary Oxford, under Benjamin Jowett. It illustrates that Pater was sympathetic to dominant understandings of the classical world, but, beginning in the mid-1870s, began to explore darker and more subversive aspects of ancient Greek culture, including the myths of Demeter and Dionysus. It provides guidance on how to read and understand Pater’s representation of the classical world, in the context of classical education at Oxford, with examples from works including ‘The Marbles of Aegina’ (1880) and Plato and Platonism (1893).

This chapter discusses the origins of modern climate science in nineteenth-century projects of empire, and shows how literature both promoted and contested the imperial impulses of emerging climate science. The chapter examines, first, how imperialism – the enlargement of a single country’s jurisdiction across large tracts of land and sea – facilitated scientific methods and data. It then turns to literary justifications of imperial and scientific expansion, with accounts of the Arctic expeditions of John Franklin – Franklin’s narratives, the poetry of Eleanor Anne Porden (who became Franklin’s wife), elegies, and ballads – providing a case study. Staying with the mythologization of the explorer as a conqueror of climate, the chapter takes up the question of climate determinism (the idea of climate’s agency in shaping physiology and psychology, and the attendant myth of British colonizers’ resistance to such agency). Yet, from Richard Burton’s travels to Rudyard Kipling’s fiction, Victorian literature reveals, sometimes unwittingly, that the imperial explorer did not remain untouched by climate.