This chapter begins by describing the pre-history of southern China and the origins of colonial Hong Kong. It then proceeds to a discussion of English in the late nineteenth century and the formation of an English-speaking Chinese elite in colonial Hong Kong. Since the resumption of Chinese sovereignty in 1997, the government has promoted a policy of “trilingualism” (Cantonese, English, and Putonghua) and “biliteracy” (written Chinese and English). Recently, the national government has moved to assert tighter control over the territory, and there has been increasing importance placed on the learning and use of the national language, Putonghua. At present, English continues to be widely used in key domains of Hong Kong society, including government, law and many areas of employment. This is likely to continue in the future, despite Hong Kong’s increasing integration economically, politically, socially, and linguistically into mainland China.

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.

The roots of London English go back – in the textual record – to the Middle English period and already in the 1300s exhibit features which reveal diverse and multilingual influences, e.g. from medieval French and Latin. The examination of morphological features characteristic of this urban variety in its early stages is helpful in constructing a linguistic profile for early London English. Data sources for this include guild certificates, accounts and company records, with London English in later centuries being recorded by orthoepists (in the 1600s) who list sounds characteristic of speech in the capital which later fed into supraregional varieties in the south of England in general. These phonological traits, and many which were specific to London, are attested in literary documents in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.

Chapter 5 broadly discusses language use in multilingual and multidialectal societies, codeswitching, language birth, and language loss. We include case studies of multilingualism in the Vaupès in Amazonia and the Maghreb in Africa, the intermingled nature of Maltese and Michif, and English-only movements in North America.

This chapter argues that linguists should expand the data used in linguistics education to include second language data and that expanding linguistic education to include second language and multilingualism at its core would put the field of linguistics in a better position to bridge the gap between second language education programs and linguistics. It gives several arguments for including second language data in linguistics education: Second language data are natural language data and should be included in models of language, second language acquisition and first language acquisition share many characteristics, knowledge of second language acquisition will put graduates in a stronger position for academic jobs, and including second language data in linguistics education can promote an awareness of linguistic diversity and work toward a more inclusive field. It offers some suggestions for how to incorporate second language data into linguistics courses and a discusses some of the barriers to this proposal. It concludes with two examples of exercises which use second language data to reinforce basic linguistic concepts.

In this concluding chapter we consider our results in the larger frameworks of multilingualism and language change and show that these areas cohere. We consult an ongoing program of study of the acquisition of multilingualism and report results documenting both structural constraint on the multilingual course of acquisition of relativization and the integration of principles of language-specific grammar. The results reported in this book reflect general properties of language acquisition and are not limited to the child or to monolingual contexts alone. We relate our results regarding the nature of language change in acquisition to that of language change in historical contexts and argue that a gradual integration of linguistic knowledge culminates in the creation of a linguistic system over time in both contexts. Finally, we consult a more refined notion of “recursion,” and in keeping with recent theoretical developments in the implementation of recursion in Universal Grammar, we reject a claim that the developmental results in this book reflect an absence of recursion in early child language. We describe the implications of our results on the acquisition of relativization for our understanding of the Language Faculty in the human species.

This chapter examines the applicability of the term “cosmopolitanism” to Indian Ocean contexts through the question of language, asking: How does one represent a multilingual past using the medium of historical fiction? It examines the use of multilingualism and translation in Amitav Ghosh’s Sea of Poppies (2008) and Abdulrazak Gurnah’s Paradise (1994), novels that draw on multilingual nineteenth-century sources to tell stories of cross-cultural encounters in the Indian Ocean. These novels use various textual strategies, such as direct inscription of multiple languages or indirect description of linguistic difference, to portray a multilingual Indian Ocean encounters. Closely examining these textual moments alongside the novels’ sources reveals the limits of liberal cosmopolitanisms constructed both within and through the texts. They articulate a politics of language that shapes cosmopolitan intercourse in the Indian Ocean, and in doing so, self-reflexively critique the Anglophone text as a medium of cosmopolitan exchange today.

On the map of modern Hebrew literature, the American Hebrew center remains largely a terra incognita. The chapter considers this often-neglected center from a local perspective by examining the cultural and literary interactions of Hebrew writers in New York City with their non-Jewish environment. By expanding the scope of these interactions to include American literary Naturalism and modern Yiddish literature, I show how Hebrew writers in the United States engaged with and benefited from other literatures and cultures. The chapter focuses on the literary works of Simon Halkin and Abraham Zvi Halevy, particularly their representations of New York City. Halkin’s and Halevy’s oeuvres exemplify the various identity conflicts, ideological polemics, and linguistic possibilities that took place within the multicultural and multilingual space of Interbellum New York. Understanding their literary projects within a broader Jewish American context enriches our understanding of American Hebrew literature.

This chapter makes the case for “Global Haskalah,” an expansion and revision of Jewish literary history that investigates connections among Haskalah projects throughout the Jewish world as well as relationships between Hebrew and Jewish vernacular languages. While focusing on multilingual Jewish literary circulation and exchange in the global Jewish diaspora, my approach also emphasizes translation and rewriting as its primary mode of expression; the role of Hebrew as a mediator of intra-Jewish exchange and bridge from foreign languages to Jewish vernaculars; the relationship of Jewish literary revival to global trends and forces; and the colonial dynamics of world literature vis-à-vis the Haskalah. After outlining the Global Haskalah as a historical phenomenon and a scholarly methodology, I offer summaries of two case studies based on novels that circulated within Hebrew, Judeo-Arabic, Ladino, and Yiddish. The first, Robinson Crusoe, illustrates the strategies used by Jewish translators in domesticating a quintessentially European Christian text while the other, The Love of Zion, demonstrates the mix of cultural diversity and diasporic interconnection exemplifying the Global Haskalah. In both cases, I show how tracing routes of circulation, juxtaposing multiple Jewish-language translations, and reading them comparatively and contextually can generate new insights into the formation of Jewish literary modernity.

This chapter discusses poets of the South West Asian and North African diasporas who have experienced exile and loss, some as refugees. It describes a translingual pluriverse of diasporic poets from a region that has come to have many names and terminologies assigned to it. The chapter reflects on the political and cultural conditions in which diasporic writers produce poetry in Australia, in both spoken and written forms. Themes of witness, protest and identity, often interwoven, are analysed. The chapter considers the presence of poets from Arabic-, Kurdish-, Dari- and Farsi-speaking backgrounds, some of whom write in English while others have translingual practices and experiment with hybrid modes. It assesses the impact of settler monolingualism in Australia and argues for the importance of multilingual poetry in articulating cultural diversity and challenging delimiting discursive systems. The significance of literary journals is also detailed, and the value of poetry in the face of violence, displacement and prejudice is asserted.