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.

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.