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

British colonial invasion of the Australian continent has had a substantial and often devastating impact on the lives and livelihoods of the original inhabitants. The story of survival is therefore partly one of linguistic adaptation and innovation. For as invasion, displacement and forced relocation rolled across the continent, the language ecologies were also invaded, disturbed and displaced. English has been inserted into the linguistic landscape and contact with its speakers has seeded many new varieties. This chapter surveys the literature that captures this spectacular proliferation of English-influenced varieties; their linguistic structures and the sociolinguistic contexts that make them unique. The chapter ends by focusing on one of the key issues in the study of contact Englishes in Australia: the relationship between individual and community multilingualism.

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

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.

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.

With arguably the largest number of speakers of any postcolonial variety of English and a history stretching over four centuries, Indian English has received more attention in the literature than many other varieties. This chapter will track its emergence and development from the end of the sixteenth century onwards, from early English-speaking travelers and the earliest English trading ventures via the gradual extension of British colonial power over the subcontinent and its linguistic consequences, to the diffusion of English to ever greater sections of society at the start of the twenty-first century. Regarding the structure of Indian English, this chapter will take advantage of the large body of corpus-based research which has probed into the actual frequency and distribution of a wide range of Indian English features, allowing for a more empirical approach towards Indian English, encompassing its phonology, morphosyntax, lexicon and (discourse) pragmatics.

This chapter explores the linguistic consequences of language contact between English and Afrikaans in South Africa, focusing on the English spoken by Afrikaans speakers in South Africa. Against the backdrop of two centuries of language contact and bilingualism, the multifaceted nature of interactions in diverse social settings are investigated, and the linguistic outcomes of these settings are outlined. The chapter highlights the bidirectional influence between Afrikaans and English, with evidence of influence mainly from Afrikaans to Afrikaans South African English (ASAE), but the reciprocal influence between ASAE and other vernaculars is also highlighted. The linguistic review describes ASAE pronunciation, vocabulary, grammar, and stylistic features, by offering evidence from corpora, dictionaries and important works on the two ethnic subvarieties of ASAE. Overall, strong similarities with White South African English are found, but some differences reveal the influence from Afrikaans. For phonological features, there are quantity rather than quality differences for the tense-lax vowel contrast and hiatus breaking through [h] that distinguish ASAE from WSAE. For lexicogrammar, ASAE is observed to model its use of lexemes, collocational patterns and more abstract grammatical patterns, on Afrikaans constructions. The likelihood that White South African English speakers are not directly influenced by Afrikaans itself but rather by ASAE is considered as a topic for further study.

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.

The Italian Papyri are a source of great importance for the study of variation and change in Late Latin for several reasons. The first is that they show a wide range of Latin stylistic levels that runs from the grammatically correct, even elegant, Latin of the culturally and socially higher contexts of some documents to the more colloquial, even humble, language of the more modest contexts with respect to the rank of peoples involved, their cultural level, and the type and function of the document. Another source of interest is that they bear witness to a considerable number of ‘submerged’ structures that are attested in Early Latin, disappear in texts of Classical Latin, and resurface in post-Classical and Late Latin. A third is that they preserve many structures that are forerunners of patterns occurring in the Romance vernaculars, either as first testimonies or as continuators of ‘submerged’ Latin forms. In this chapter a sociolinguistic method of investigation of the Italian Papyri is presented that combines consideration of the internal and external factors of variation and change. Some results are also presented that deal with the diachronic dynamics of Latin morphological and syntactic structures.

Latin ostraca were produced in multicultural environments such as Egypt and North Africa, where Latin was often in contact with other languages and scripts. As a result, they sometimes feature the phenomenon of allography, i.e. the use of an uncommon script for a specific language. A categorisation of allographic phenomena is proposed here: taking the sentence as a point of reference, a tripartition is advanced into ‘complete’, ‘partial’, and ‘occasional’ allography, which identifies phenomena acting respectively at the level of the entire sentence, single word(s), and single character(s). The analysis also takes into account background elements such as the competence of the scribes and the reasons that lead to these phenomena.