English in Canada

The spread of English to Canada was the consequence of colonies established by New Englanders in the eighteenth century, principally constituted of those who remained loyal to Britain following the American Declaration of Independence in 1776． At the same time, settlers arrived from England, Scotland, and Ireland, adding further dialects to the mixture. As a result, there are many similarities between the English heard in Canada and America, although Canadian English shares several features with the English spoken in the UK. In terms of pronunciation, Canadians tend to sound like Americans to most people from outside North America; distinctive features include the rhotic pronunciation of car, the ‘d’-like pronunciation of bottle, and the use of American alternatives like ‘tomayto’ for British English ‘tomahto,’ and ‘skedule’ for British English ‘shedule.’

Canadian English does not follow American English in all such cases; British English preferences are found in words like news, which is pronounced ‘nyoos’ rather than ‘noos’, and in the pronunciation of anti-, where American English has ‘antai’. While Canadian English follows American English in much of its vocabulary, compare gas (British English petrol), sidewalk (BrEng pavement), trunk (BrEng boot), it preserves English words such as tap (American English faucet), cutlery (American silverware), and serviette (American napkin). Canadian English spelling tends to follow British conventions, as in honour, colour, centre, and theatre, although some individual words, like curb and tire, follow the American practice.

English in Australia and New Zealand

The same process of dialect mixing that triggered a distinctive American variety lies behind the Englishes spoken in Australia and New Zealand. British convicts who were deported to Australia in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries were frequently of Cockney and Irish extraction, so that these dialects have a particular importance for the formation of the distinctive Australian accent. Colonial lag is evident in the preservation of some archaic English words, such as the Australian tucker ‘food,’ from the word tuck, still preserved in old-fashioned English tuck shops and tuck boxes, and dunny ‘toilet,’ which was current in English slang of the late eighteenth century.

Other features which are uniquely Australian are words formed by adding an ‘ie’ ending, as in barbie ‘barbeque,’ coldie ‘cold beer,’ rellies ‘relatives,’ and even Aussie, as well as contractions like arvo ‘afternoon,’ journo ‘journalist,’ and beaut ‘beauty.’ British settlers in Australia adopted local words from Aboriginal languages to describe cultural objects and practices specific to Australia, such as the boomerang, from the Dharuk language, and indigenous animals such as koala, wallaby, and kangaroo.

The first settlers in New Zealand arrived in the 1790s, although official colonies were not established until 1840． Because this is a more recent variety, more is known about the dialects of the earliest settlers who first migrated from Britain to New Zealand. Recordings made in the 1940s of speakers born and raised in New Zealand reveal a liberal and apparently random conglomeration of features drawn from a great variety of English dialects. Greater affinity to Britain has led to the acceptance of more influence from the English spoken in Britain, while a desire to set the New Zealand usage apart from that of Australia has prompted further distinctive differences in accent. Where the Australian accent tends to pronounce the place name Sydney as ‘Seedney’, New Zealanders prefer a ‘Sudney’-style pronunciation.

English in South Asia

The origins of South Asian English lie in Britain; the English language was established in India, Singapore, Malaysia, and Hong Kong as they were incorporated within the British Empire. During the period of British sovereignty in India, English was adopted as the principal language of administration, law, and education. Today, English retains official recognition as an associate language of India, alongside the main official language of Hindi, although in some areas it is the official language, while in others it is preferred to Hindi as a lingua franca. Since the population of India is in excess of a billion people, this creates the potential for a vast collection of English speakers, although the varying levels of education mean that the total number is closer to 250 million, with perhaps a further 350,000 using English as a second language.

A further 22 million people speak English as a second language in Pakistan, Nepal, Bangladesh, Bhutan, and Sri Lanka. English is used in Hong Kong, Singapore, and Malaysia as the medium for the education, legal, and administrative systems, though it is not accorded any form of official status. English enjoys a more central role in Singapore than in Malaysia, where Malay is dominant, or in Hong Kong, where Chinese has primary status.

Mixed Varieties: Singlish

The interaction between English and these Asian varieties has led to considerable language mixing; in Singapore, a new variety, known as Singlish, has emerged. While the Singaporean education system, its broadcasting corporation, and newspapers such as the Strait Times continue to recognize Standard British English and its RP accent, many Singaporeans employ a colloquial variety which mixes English with Malay and Chinese.

A characteristic instance of such mixing is the frequent use of the Chinese discourse particles lah and ah, tagged on to the ends of sentences to convey emphasis: ‘Ok-lah,’ or to indicate a question: ‘Should I go-ah?’ Singlish incorporates loanwords, such as the Malay makan ‘food,’ and Chinese ang pow ‘cash gift,’ while words of English origin have different meanings, such as send ‘take’ and stay ‘live.’ Further distinctive features of Singlish include its tendency to drop articles, ‘You have book?’, plural inflexions, ‘I have two car,’ verb endings, ‘Yesterday I walk home,’ ‘This taste good,’ and even the verb to be: ‘This man clever.’

Despite its widespread use, especially among the younger generation, the official status of Singlish continues to provoke controversy. The Singapore government remains firmly committed to the promotion of Standard English as the language of education, trade, commerce, and technology. In order to challenge the widespread use of Singlish, in 2000 the government launched the ‘Speak Good English’ campaign, which aimed to promote Standard English at the expense of Singlish, considered to be incomprehensible to outsiders.

Despite the appearance of Chinglish, Japlish, Denglish, Anglikaans, and other mixed varieties, or ‘interlanguages,’ their status continues to be hotly debated. Are they examples of ‘code-switching,’ pidgins, or dialects that have borrowed significantly from another language?

In former colonies, the appropriation and remodelling represented by mixed forms of English have political and ideological ramifications. Where the Standard English of Britain is linked with a nation’s colonial past, mixed forms of English come to stand for greater political and national independence. As the novelist Salman Rushdie has written: ‘Those peoples who were once colonized by the language are now rapidly remaking it, domesticating it, becoming more and more relaxed about the way they use it. Assisted by the English language’s flexibility and size, they are carving out large territories for themselves within its front.’ The reappropriation and remodelling of English that is apparent in such mixed varieties, driven by communicative and ideological factors, is likely to play a major role in the language’s future development.

The Future

Given this narrative of constant expansion, language mixing, and new dialect formation, we might wonder what the future is for English in the twenty-first century. Will its continued spread lead to further fragmentation, so that future speakers of English around the globe will no longer be able to understand each other?

Despite the efforts of the Singaporean government, Singlish continues to flourish. As new generations grow up preferring mixed tongues like Singlish in the home, the playground, and on the streets, so these varieties will begin to supplant Standard English in the more formal and prestigious domains. While Standard English retains an important international function in Singapore, Singlish plays a key role in the establishment of a national identity and in negotiating and maintaining interpersonal relation- ships. The displacement of Standard English in official use in its former colonies would inevitably lead to greater divisions between the English of the Inner Circle and that used in the Expanding Circle. Would such varieties remain mutually intelligible under such conditions?

Linguists have detected the emergence of a variety known as World Standard English in use throughout the globe, which may lend qualified support to such a theory. Although not a single, fixed variety, World Standard English appears to be operating as a regionally neutral and increasingly uniform standard, available for use by English speakers of any nation. In its written form, this standard draws upon American conventions of spelling; in chemistry we find sulfur rather than sulphur, in computing we find program not programme, disk not disc. In the spoken language it remains unclear whether the British prestige RP accent or the General American accent will come to be recognized as a single agreed standard. A further possibility is that it will be neither British English nor General American that will be selected, but rather a kind of compromise variety that draws on both, and potentially other, Englishes. A possible model for this is the ‘Euro- English’ that can be heard within the European Parliament among representatives from throughout the European Union. Predictions about the break-up of the English language into distinct languages are not new. Writing in 1877, the linguist Henry Sweet (the inspiration behind Bernard Shaw’s Henry Higgins) asserted that in a hundred years: ‘England, America, and Australia will be speaking mutually unintelligible languages.’ While Sweet’s confident forecast warns us against attempting to predict the future, it also reminds us that gloomy prophecies about the end of English as we know it are not new, and do not necessarily come true. 

Adapted from How English Became English by Simon Horobin with permission from Oxford University Press USA.  Copyright © 2016 Simon Horobin and published by Oxford University Press USA. (www.oup.com/us). All rights reserved.