Keywords

World Englishes

Language

Whereas the English-speaking world was formerly perceived as a hierarchy of parent (Britain) and children (‘the colonies’), it is now seen rather as a family of varieties. The English of England, the original source of all the World Englishes, is now seen as one of the family’ of world English varieties, with its own peculiarities and its own distinctive vocabulary.

I just discovered, via a LanguageHat post on Singlish, that Wikipedia has a wonderful index of all the major varieties of English (they use the term dialects” which I have a problem with, since some of these varieties are not mutually intelligible).

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