NEKO'S CORNER- REFERENCE PAGE
English is spoken today on all five continents as a result of colonial expansion.
With regard to numbers of speakers it is only exceeded by Chinese and Spanish.
But in terms of geographical spread it stands at the top of the league.
The two main groups are Britain and America. For each there are standard forms of English which are used as yardsticks for
comparing other varieties of the respective áreas:
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In Britain the standard is called Received Pronunciation
(formerly King’s English).
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In America there is a standard which is the General American
and Network American.
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URBAR AREAS:
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London (Berkshire, Buckinghamshire, Hertfordshire, Essexs, Surrey, Sussexs and Kent)
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Kent
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The South-West (Devon and Cornwall)
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The Midlands (Leicester and Birmingham)
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East Anglia (Norfolk and Suffolk)
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Merseyside (Manchester and Liverpool)
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Yorkshire (York)
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The North-West (Cumberland and Lancashire)
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Tyneside (Newcastle, Sunderland and Durham)
Of the three Celtic areas left Scotland is definitely the one with the oldest tradition of English, both spoken and written.
The term Scotland comes from Latin Scotii which was originally a term for the Irish, who settled the western coast of Scotland and
Christianised it before England was converted from the south with the mission of Saint Augustine at the end of the 6th century.
The adjective Scottish has two further variants:
- Scots (used to refer to the particular variety of English spoken natively in Scotland)
- Scotch (the country’s type of whiskey).
The word Welsh derives from the Old English word wealh ‘foreigner’, ‘slave’ - but also ‘Celt’ - and occurs as a surname also
with an additional form Wallace going back to Anglo-Norman walleis.
The term ‘Northern Irish English’ refers to the varieties spoken in the state of Northern Ireland established with the partition of the
country in 1921. The term Ulster is used synonymously by many to refer to Northern Ireland.
The English of the south of Ireland is called simply Irish English.
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The modern era history of North America begins with the discovery of Central America by Christopher Columbus in 1492 when he
landed on the island of Hispaniola.
The term African American English (formerly referred to as ‘African American Vernacular English’ and much earlier as ‘Black
English’) refers to the varieties of English spoken by those people in the United States who stem from the original African population transported there.
The word ‘Chicano’ refers to the people, culture and forms of English of those individuals in the USA who are of Latin American
origin. The generic terms ‘Hispanic’ and ‘Latino’ are also common and there is much debate in USA society, especially in the west and south-west of the country as to which term to use. Official census figures used the term Hispanic in the 1970s but later changed to the combined label ‘Hispanic or Latino’.
John Cabot landed in Newfoundland in 1497 and so began the settlement of Canada by Europeans. Up to this date indigenous
tribes peopled the country. Their languages are still extant in small ethnic groups within present-day Canada; their position is similar to that of the native Indians in the United States; their languages belong to the various language families of the North American continent which pre-date the coming of the Europeans.
The islands of the Caribbean were discovered by the Italian explorer Christopher Columbus, working for the then Spanish
monarchy in 1492.
Apart from English the two other main European languages are French and Spanish spoken on Haiti on the one hand and the
Dominican Republic, Cuba and Puerto Rico on the other. Dutch was also present on the southern rim of the Caribbean.
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In 1652 the Cape of Good Hope was colonialised by Dutch navigators thus establishing the Dutch claim to this part of Africa,
the original leader being Jan van Riebeeck, seen in a triumphalist pose in the above picture. For 150 years the English did not disturb the colony; in 1806 however they invaded the region and brought the English language there thus initiating the dual European language tradition which exists to the present day. After the Napoleonic wars the number of permanent English settlers increased forming the group known as the ‘1820 settlers’ who represented the backbone of English settlement in South Africa. In 1822 Lord Somerset declared English the only official language of the Cape Colony.
Furthermore, English is used as a lingua franca by millions and in this context co-exists with Afrikaans (mixtures of Afrikaans and English are not uncommon and termed ‘Anglikaans’) and many indigenous languages such as those of the Bantu and Khoisian groups. Since the change-over in power to a largely black government in the early 1990s the Republic of South Africa has recognised some 11 languages as official, including English and Afrikaans.
The anglophone South Atlantic consists of three island locations:
- St. Helena
- Tristan da Cunha
- The Falklands
The island of St Helena is a British Overseas Territory first discovered by the Portuguese in 1502 who gave it its name. The East India Company managed the island for a considerable period from 1658 to 1815 and again as the British East India Company from 1821 to 1834. From 1815-1821 Napoleon Bonaparte was in exile on St Helena. In the 1830s it was directly ruled by the British as a crown colony and in 1922 it became a dependency. St. Helena received a status of partial autonomy in 1966.
Tristan da Cunha consists of an English-speaking community of just over 260 people. The first people to land on the island arrived in 1643. However, the settlement of the island did not begin until the early nineteenth century (1816) when British soldiers were stationed there while Napoleon was held captive on St Helena. The present-day islanders are descendants of this original group and of some sailors from whaling ships as well as of non-English speakers from a few other sources.
The Falklands consists of two major islands – West Falkland and East Falkland – along with several smaller islands occupy an area of some 12,200 square km.
A British possession since 1833, when the Argentinians were ousted, the islands have been the object of general attention by
Argentina prompting claims to the islands, climaxing in the Falklands War of 1982 when Argentina briefly occupied the islands
they call Las Malvinas before being militarily defeated by the British.
The Falklands constitute a British Overseas Territory and just over 60% of the 3,200 people on the archipelago are native to the Falklands. The remainder are British stationed there along with very small numbers of other ethnicities.
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English in Asia consists of many different levels of second-language competence and also contains an emergent set of native speaker or quasi-native speaker varieties in countries like Singapore.
South Asia is linguistically quite heterogeneous. Over 70% of the languages spoken in India are Indo-Aryan. About a quarter of languages are Dravidian, a separate language family found in the east and south of India.
India was one of the largest and most important of the British colonies. It was colonised early by the British and was originally in the hands of English firms which organised trade with the colony, the most important of these was the powerful East India Company founded in 1600 and which established bases later in the century at many of the sites which were to become major cities of India: Bombay, Calcutta, Madras.
Because of the size and linguistic complexity of India, English has had a special function as a means of communication. This has been officially encoded in the three language formula which in the sixties was suggested for education: the state language, Hindi and English were to be taught to allow local identity, national feeling and international access to be maintained.
Singapore was founded in 1819 by Sir Stamford Raffles by signing a treaty with a local Sultan on behalf of the British East India Company.
The Republic of Singapore has four official languages - English, Chinese, Malay and Tamil of which the national language is, for historical reasons, Malay.
The English language is continuously increasing in importance in Signapore. The authorities have been concerned with establishing it as the first language of public life.
British trade with China in the 18th and 19th centuries was concentrated on the region of Guangdong (Canton) and Fujian
(Fukien). Britain, along with other countries, established bases in China ports and this trade, in which many European countries were involved, was disadvantageous to the Chinese.
The legacy of the 18th- and 19th- century trade contacts between the British and the Chinese was the establishment of a British presence in Hong Kong. During the British period English was widespread in the city and was influenced by Cantonese and Mandaring. With the withdrawal of the British English in everyday use declined but it is widely used in official and commerical dealings.
English in the Philippines was established after the Americans defeated the Spanish in 1898 and acquired this country (and Cuba) as overseas territories. Until after the Second World War there was a considerable influence of American English on public language usage in the Philippines, a noticeable exception in the context of other South-East Asian countries.
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Australia has known three colonial periods:
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The first is the brief one of the Spanish involving the initial discovery of Australia by de Quirós in 1606.
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A Dutch expedition under Willem Jansz arrived at the Torres Strait at approximately the same time as Luis de Torres
himself. In 1611 some Dutch ships sailing eastward from the Cape of Good Hope reached west Australia.
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The British In 1688 William Dampier explored north east Australia; in 1699-1700 he explored further, both times writing
an exhaustive account of his journeys. British involvement in Australia really got underway with James Cook who, in three
major explorations in 1768-1770, 1772-1775 and 1776-1779, firmly established Australia as an object of colonial interest.
Originally Australia was used as a release for the overcrowded British prisons. Britain established several penal colonies and by the first quarter of the 19th century most of coastal Australia had been settled by the British. By 1830 an estimated 58,000 convicts had been settled.
The Great Shift from 1830 to 1860 saw the rise of Australia with its agricultural and mining economy.