English Outside Great Britain

Geographical Expansion of the English Language from the 17th to 19th c.

In the last three hundred years the English language has extended to all the continents of the world and the number of English speakers has multiplied.

We may recall that in OE and Early ME periods the English dialects were confined to part of the British Isles: they were spoken in what is known as England proper; from the 13th to the 17th c. the English language extended to the whole of the British Isles with the exception of some mountainous regions in Wales, Northern Scotland and some parts of Ireland.

The number of English-speaking people grew: at the end of the 11th c. it is estimated at one and a half or two million people; by 1700 English had over eight million speakers. In the course of two centuries of British expansion overseas, colonisation and emigration to other continents, the number of English speakers increased at such a high rate that by 1900 it had reached one hundred and twenty three million.

England’s colonial expansion to the New World began in the late 16th c. when her first colonies were set up in Newfoundland (1583). But the real start came later: in 1607 the first permanent settlements were founded in Jamestown and in 1620 the famous ship “Mayflower” brought a group of English settlers to what became known as New England. These Puritan fugitives from the Stuart absolutism came from the London area, from East Anglia and Yorkshire; later colonists came from other regions, including Scotland and Ireland. Immigrants to the Southern areas were of a higher class origin; they received vast stretches of land from the kings of England and gave rise to the Southern “aristocratic” slave-owning plantators. Many immigrants from Great Britain settled in the West-Indies, which became a part of the British Empire in the 17th c.

The colonists spoke different dialects of English. In North America those dialects gradually blended into a new type of the language, American English; contacts with other languages, especially Spanish in the South and French in Canada, have played a certain role in its development.

American English was first proclaimed to be an independent language by Noah Webster (1758—1843), a schoolmaster from Connecticut. In his DICTIONARY OF THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE (1828), the first in the world-famous series of “Websters”, he showed the differences in vocabulary and pronunciation between the English of Britain and the English of the new independent state (after the War for Independence, which ended in 1783); Am E, in his opinion, was a pure uncorrupted descendant of Chaucer and Shakespeare, while Br E had been spoiled by linguistic change. He admitted, though, that the two types of English were basically identical.

The expansion of English to Asia is mainly connected with the occupation of India. India was one of the main issues in the colonial struggle of European powers in the 18th c. The conquest of India had been prepared by the activities of the East Indian trade company founded in the 17th c. In the late 18th c. Britain secured partial control over the administration in some of the Indian provinces. In the first half of the 19th c. India became a British colony and Britain acquired other possessions in Asia, turning them into colonies, dominions or protectorates. Thus the English language extended to many areas in Asia, as the language of the state and writing.

Australia was a place of deportation of British convicts since the late 18th c. A flow of immigrants were attracted to Australia, at first by the free grants of land, later — by the discovery of gold. The bulk of the population in Australia, as well as in New Zealand, came from Great Britain; their language is regarded by some linguists as an independent geographical variant of English, though its difference from Br E is not great: it is confined to some peculiarities of pronunciation and specific words.

British penetration into Africawas a lengthy affair that extended over the 19th c. In consequence of financial dependence on British capital, Sudan and Egypt fell under British political control. Tropical Africa and South Africa were raided by the British navy, as sources of slave labour for America and the West Indies. Trade companies were supported by open warfare, and in a long series of wars many African territories fell under British rule. Cecil Rhodes and H. Kitchener undertook to extend British territories, so as to connect Cairo and the Cape colony by a stretch of British land. Numerous conflicts with the Dutch settlers in South Africa led to the Anglo-Boer war of 1899-1902, which established the supremacy of the British. All these events were accompanied by the spread of English to new areas.

In the course of the 20th c. Great Britain lost the greater part of its possessions overseas and the use of the English language was reduced. We should distinguish between countries with an English speaking population (or with a large proportion of English speakers) and countries in which English is used only as the state language, the main language of the press, radio and literature. The distinction, however, is not always possible, for in both groups of countries part of the population is bilingual, and the proportion of English speakers cannot be precisely estimated. The list of countries with an English-speaking population outside the British Isles includes the United States of America, Australia, New Zealand, Canada and the South African Republic.

Glossary

National language – the language, which embraces all the varieties of the language used by the nation including dialects.

National literary language – the recognized standard forms of the language, both written and spoken; for earlier periods of history the term “literary language” may indicate the language of writing in a wider sense, including chronicles, legal documents, religious texts, etc. A mature national literary language is characterised by codified norms or rules of usage and functional stylistic differentiation.

 

Literature

A) Principal:

1. Rastorgueva T.A. A History of -English. M., 1983. – Chapter XI (P.149-163), Chapter XII (P.164-184).

B) Supplementary:

1. Залесcкая Л.Д., Матвеева Д.А. Пособие по истории английского языка для заочных отделений факультетов английского языка педагогических институтов. – М., 1984. – C. 59-62, 83.

2. Иванова И.П., Чахоян Л.П., Беляева Т.М. История английского языка. – СПб.,1999. – С.19-40.