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What's Your English?: Varieties of English Around The World

This document discusses the variations of English that have developed around the world. It explains that as colonial powers spread their language and established it in their colonies, standardized versions of English were carried to these places. Over time, the English spoken in former colonies developed slight differences from the standardized English taught in schools, with some variations arising from outdated speech habits or influence from the local language. The document then outlines the sections that will examine the specific variations of English that have developed in places like England, Scotland, Ireland, Wales, North America, Australia, New Zealand, and South Africa.

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Michelle Ylonen
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56 views2 pages

What's Your English?: Varieties of English Around The World

This document discusses the variations of English that have developed around the world. It explains that as colonial powers spread their language and established it in their colonies, standardized versions of English were carried to these places. Over time, the English spoken in former colonies developed slight differences from the standardized English taught in schools, with some variations arising from outdated speech habits or influence from the local language. The document then outlines the sections that will examine the specific variations of English that have developed in places like England, Scotland, Ireland, Wales, North America, Australia, New Zealand, and South Africa.

Uploaded by

Michelle Ylonen
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
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What's Your English?

http://reese.linguist.de/English/

Varieties of English Around the World

The following article is a term paper of a seminar on The English Language offered to
second-year students at the Osnabrück University, Lower Saxony, Germany.

It describes the slight differences as to which Standard English varies across the world.
At the end of the 20th century, it can be regarded as the most wide-spread language of
the world. There are more than 50 legally independent states in the world, where it
functions as official language. Out of those, there is even a number of states, where it is
also used for every-day conversations. This is a very new phenomenon. In most pre-
modern societies, languages tended to diverse quite fast, spreading into a large number
of different dialects, which often lost mutual intellegibility and developed into diverging
sound and morphosyntactic systems. As a standard, every rural village and every town
tended to have its own language.

Since colonial times, a new development has arisen. Imperialistic states carried their
language out of their countries and established it in their colonies. And it was their
Standard variety that they carried out. This is how first in times, languages can be found
that differ very little across space. As for English, there a two linguistic kinds of former
colonies: those that adopted English as an official language with no impact on every-
day life, and those that were settled by people from the Isles, and that grew to be
English-speaking in every sense of the word. These countries whose colloquial language
shows only slight deviation from Standard English as it is taught in school are the topic
of this paper.

Introduction
The English language is one of the few ones that are spoken in a great number of
countries. In the case of English, those countries tend to be quite distant from one
another. Some of them have enjoyed long times of independent development, as the
United States, others saw their national language being replaced by English because of
the lack of independent development, as e.g. Ireland. It may not be confusing that the
way the language of England is used nowadays in all those different countries is not the
same as in the mother country, whose Standard is taught in most countries, where
English functions as a second language in school. Some differences may come from
speech habits that got out of fashion in England, but remained in those regions far from
the cultural centre of London. Others can be based on the substratum of the former
language of the country.

Contents
 England
 Scotland
o The Lowlands
 From literary "Inglis" to Braid Scots - the history of the Scottish
tongue
 What is Scots?
 Scottish English
o The Highlands
 The Celtic languages
 Highland English after replacing Gaelic
 The Celtic countries - Ireland and Wales
o Wales
o Ireland
 North America
o How did American English arise?
o The American language
 General American
 American grammar
 American spelling
 American vocabulary
 American slang
o Dialectal divergence
 New England
 New York City
 The South
o The special situation of Canada
 New Foundland
 Australia and New Zealand
o Australian English
 The origin of Australian English
 Australianisms
 Educated and Broad Australian
 Pronunciation
o How to recognize a New Zealander
 South Africa
 References

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