History of
English
World English II
Facultad de Lenguas
y Educación
Australia
Australia was visited by James Cook in
1770, and within 20 years Britain had
established the first penal colony at
Sydney, thus relieving the pressure on the
overcrowded prisons in England. About
130.000 prisoners were transported during
the 50 years after the arrival of the “first
fleet” in 1788. “Free settlers”, as they were
called, also began to enter the country
from the very beginning, but they did not
achieve substantial numbers until the mid-
19th century. From them on, immigration
rapidly increased , different pronunciation,
different stress, etc.
World English I I 2
Australian English
• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xBR1aAx0qck
• London and Ireland
• words typical thought Australian actually started in Britain, and may still be
heard locally in British dialects, such as cobber, tucker and joker
• only a few Aboriginal words came into English, most of them, plant and
animal names such as kangaroos and koala (…). Most of the Australian
names are aboriginal
• highly colloquial
3
Many words which are still used frequently by rural Australians are also used in
all or part of England, with variations in meaning:
• outback which means a remote
• sparsely-populated area
• creek in Australia (as in North America), is any stream or small river,
whereas in England it is a small watercourse flowing into the sea
• paddock is the Australian word for field, while in England it is a small
enclosure for livestock
• bush (as in North America) or scrub mean wooded areas" or country areas
in general" in Australia, while in England, they are commonly used only in
proper names (such as Shepherds Bush and Wormwood Scrubs)
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• Australian English and several British English dialects (eg. Cockney, Scouse,
Geordie) use the word mate to mean a close friend of the same gender
• Dinkum or fair dinkum means true, the truth, speaking the truth
• gday, a stereotypical Australian greeting
• Sheila, Australian slang for woman
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Aboriginal languages
• names for places, flora and fauna (for example, dingo, kangaroo)
• Cooee has also become a notional distance: if he's within cooee, we'll spot
him
• Hard yakka means hard work and is derived from yakka, from the
Yagara/Jagara language once spoken in the Brisbane region
• bung meaning broken (Brisbane region)
• In Western Australia the Nyoongah word Winyarn, meaning poor" or sick"
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Words referring to ones relatives are used in different senses to Standard
English, reflecting traditional Australian kinship systems:
• aunty and uncle are used as terms of address for older people, to whom the
speaker may not be related
• brother and sister include close relatives of the same generation, not just
siblings;
• cousin includes any relative of ones own generation;
• the combinations cousin-brother and cousin-sister are used to refer to
biological cousins;
• in south-east Queensland, daughter is used to refer to any woman of ones
great-grandparents generation; this is due to the cyclical nature of
traditional kinship systems
• father and mother include any relative of ones parents generation, such as
uncles, aunts, and in-laws
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• grandfather and grandmother can refer to anyone of ones
grandparents generation (grandfather can also refer to any
respected elderly man, to whom the speaker may not be related);
• poison refers to a relation one is obligated to avoid;
• the term second, or little bit in northern Australia, is used with a
distant relative who is described using a close kinship term. For
example, ones second fathers or little bit fathers are men of ones
fathers generation not closely related to the speaker. It is contrasted
with close, near or true.
• A skin or skin group are sections which are determined by the skin
of a persons parents, and determine who a person is eligible to
marry.
• Son can refer to any male of the next generation, such as nephews.
8
Australian Accents
• 10% men speak like Paul Hogan with what is known as a broad accent;
newsreaders, commercials
• 80% of Australians speak like Nicole Kidman with what is known as a British
received accent or general Australian English
• 10 % cultivated accent, which sounds like someone educated at Oxford
University in England
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significant difference between how men speak,
and how women speak
• It is quite rare to find a woman speaking with a broad Australian accent, and
quite rare to find a man speaking with the cultivated accent.
• there is no regional variance in the accent
• formality is more typically used by professional that don’t like each other
• convicts wanted to disguise their language so that no one would know what
they were talking about. A legacy, the contemporary Australian dialect, or
Strine, is littered with idioms, similes and invented words that make it one of
the worlds most advanced English dialects
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New Zealand
In New Zealand, the story of English started
later and moved more slowly. Captain Cook
charted the island in 1769-70, and European
whalers and traders began to settle there in the
1790s, expanding developments already taking
place in Australia (….). In comparison with
Australia, there has been a stronger sense of
the historical relationship with Britain, and a
great sympathy for British values and
institutions. This has led to a more widespread
conservatism, especially in relation to accents
(…) Crystal, 2005, p. 99. Also, we should not
forget Maori words in New Zealand English
where there is an increased awareness. Source:
https://legacy.lib.utexas.edu/maps/historical/hi
story_austral_pacific.html
World English I I 11
Theories about the origins of New Zealand English
• New Zealand English is a version of 19th century Cockney (lower-
class London) speech;
• New Zealand English is a version of Australian English;
• New Zealand English developed independently from all other
varieties from the mixture of accents and dialects that the
Anglophone settlers in New Zealand brought with them
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New Zealand English arises largely from the mixture of Englishes brought in by the early
settlers to New Zealand, with Australia providing rather more influence on that mixture
than might otherwise have been the case because of the amount of contact there was
with Australia in the early days of settlement
• Words common to Australia and New Zealand and not known elsewhere:
greeting coo-ee , the use of maimai for a hide
• more recent vocabulary items tend to divide Australia and New Zealand
rather than uniting them, there is enough evidence of vocabulary sharing
from the early period to support the notion that New Zealand English and
Australian English were once a single variety.
• when people speaking different varieties of British English are put together
in a single place, a new local variety distils out of the variation.
• early settlers in any place have a greater influence on the eventual form of
the variety which emerges from their coming together than later comers to
the same place
• while the original settlers in New Zealand were largely upper working-class
or lower middle-class
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South Africa
“Although Dutch colonies arrived in the
Cape as early as 1652, British
involvement in the region dates only
from 1795, during the Napoleonic Wars,
when an expeditionary force invaded.
British control was established in 1806
(….). English was made the official
language of the region in 1822 and there
was an attempt to anglicize the large
Afrikaans-speaking population. English
became the language of the law,
education , and most other aspects of
public life” (Crystal, 2055, p. 100).
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• certain amount of regional dialect variation among the different groups of
British settlers, with the speech of London area prominent in the Cape
Area, and Midlands and northern British speech strongly represented in
Natal
• an accent that shares many similarities with accents of Australia, which
was also being settled during this period
• English is used by the remaining whites (of mainly British background) and
by increasing number of the majority black population
• A continuum of accents exists, ranging from those which are strongly
influenced by Afrikaans to those who are close to Received Pronunciation
• Indians started arriving, firstly as labourers on the estates of Natal, later on
in the rest of the country. The Indians accepted English as the language of
communication and thus contributed to the strengthening of the language
in South Africa
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• Both English and Afrikaans are official languages in the new, post-
apartheid Republic of South Africa
• English is the first language of about 8-10% (ca. 3-4 million speakers) of
which two thirds are white. 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.
• Afrikaans English is spoken by a few million people who have Afrikaans as
their first language but who use English frequently and which shows a
number of features deriving from Afrikaans, a development from southern
Dutch dialects taken to South Africa in the second half of the 17th and in
the 18th centuries
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• South African Indian English derives from the speech of those
Indian immigrants who came to KwaZulu-Natal in the late 19th
century as labourers on the plantations. Today there are about one
million speakers of South African Indian English with varying
degrees of vernacularity.
• Syntax Again the influence of Afrikaans is noticeable, e.g. in the
lack of prepositions with many verbs, e.g. explain, reply, write.
• Deletion of verb markers and contracted forms of the verb ‘to be’
are another salient feature: You looking tired; The wife play.
• The word busy is often found as a progressive marker: They were
busy talking together. A general purpose is it? is found: He’s gone
abroad, is it?
• There is also a positive use of no in sentence-initial position as in
How are you keeping? No, we’re well thank you.
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India
India English. Source:
http://legacy.lib.utexas.edu/
maps/india.html
Hoy en día, la
Universidad
Nebrija como
entidad se
compone de
cuatro.
World English II
18
“In terms of numbers of English speakers, the Indian subcontinent ranks along
with the USA and UK ( ….). There are also considerable numbers of English
speakers elsewhere in the region which comprises six countries (India,
Bangladesh, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Nepal and Bhutan) that together thold about a
fifth of the world’s population (…). The variety is known as South Asian English.
It is only 200 years old but it is already one of the most distinctive varieties of
the English-Speaking world” (Crystal, 2005, p. 101).
The British first arrived in India in the early 1600s and soon established trading
posts in a number of cities under the control of The East India Company. By
1765 the Company’s influence had grown to such an extent that the British
were effectively controlling most parts of the country. This date is often taken
as the start of what is referred to as The Raj — a period of British rule in India
that lasted until Independence in 1947
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• Initially English was only taught to the local population through the work of
Christian missionaries — there were no official attempts to force the
language on the masses. But by the 1700s, English had firmly established
itself as the language of administration and many educated Indians were
demanding instruction in English as a means of social advancement. By
1857 universities had opened in Bombay, Calcutta and Madras. English was
increasingly accepted as the language of government, of the social elite,
and of the national press.
• After Independence, India became a nation state, and it was intended that
English would gradually be phased out as the language of administration.
But there was no simple solution as to which language should replace it. In
a country with over 900 million people and more than a thousand
languages, it is difficult to choose a single national language.social status
and have easier access to positions of power and influence. Even Ghandi, a
proponent of a native variety as a national language, accepted that his
message was most widely understood if expressed in English.
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• English remains at the heart of Indian society. It is widely used in the media,
in Higher Education and government and therefore remains a common
means of communication, both among the ruling classes, and between
speakers of mutually unintelligible languages. According to recent surveys,
approximately 4% of the Indian population use English.
• for the vast majority it remains a second language. This means there are
speakers whose spoken English is heavily influenced by speech patterns of
their ethnic language, alongside those whose speech reveals nothing of
their racial background and some who are ranged somewhere in between.
• code-switching — mixing words, phrases or even whole sentences from two
different languages within the same conversation. The occasional or even
frequent use of a Hindi (or Urdu, Punjabi, Gujurati etc.) Hinglish (i.e. Hindi
English) or Pinglish (i.e. Pakistani English).
• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aZS2KbLAy5Y
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Colonial Africa
West Africa
1: Cameroon
2: Nigeria
3: Ghana
4: Liberia
5: Sierra Leone
East Africa
Tanzania, Kenya and Uganda
Those are the most important countries,
apart from South Africa, where English is
spoken together with many dialects. The
domains are different depending on the
country, in some countries, it is official, in
others it is not, in some countries it is
mandatory at schools whereas in others not
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