The Spread of English
By the Middle Ages English had spread to the
extent that it was the main native language in all of England except Devon and
Cornwall in the southwest, Cumbria and in the northwest, and some areas
adjacent to Wales, where Welsh was still spoken.
Four hundred years ago, in 1600, English
didn't have an important role as a foreign or second language anywhere, and it
was spoken as a native language in a very small area of the globe indeed: it
was the native language of the indigenous population in most of England, and in
the south and east of Scotland. It was still absent from much of Cornwall and
from Welsh-speaking parts of Shropshire and Herefordshire; most of Ireland was
Irish-speaking; nearly all of Wales was still Welsh-speaking; the Highlands and
Hebridean Islands of Scotland spoke Gaelic; Orkney and Shetland spoke
Scandinavian Norn; the Isle of Man was Manx-speaking; and the Channel Islands
were still French-speaking.
During the course of the 1600s this situation
changed dramatically. English arrived as a native language, as a result of
colonisation, in Ireland, in what is now the United States, and in Bermuda,
Newfoundland, the Bahamas, and the Turks and Caicos Islands. It also spread
during this time into many island and mainland areas of the Caribbean as well
as to eastern coastal and island areas of Honduras, Nicaragua and Colombia
which remain English-speaking to this day.
During the 18th century English began its
expansion into Wales and north western Scotland, and mainland and maritime
Canada. In the 19th century, again as a result of colonisation, English
expanded to Hawaii, and into the Southern Hemisphere - not only to Australia,
New Zealand and South Africa, but also to the South Atlantic Islands of St.
Helena, Tristan da Cunha and the Falklands. There was also expansion from the
Caribbean islands to eastern coastal areas of Costa Rica and Panama; and
Caribbean Islands which had previously been French-speaking started on a
process of becoming English-speaking to different degrees: Dominica, St Lucia,
Trinidad and Tobago, Grenada, and St Vincent and the Grenadines.
There are also today long-standing indigenous groups of British-origin
native English speakers in Namibia, Botswana, Zimbabwe and Kenya. Many of these
areas now have their own distinctive forms of the language. We can distinguish
in particular North American, Caribbean, Southern African, and Australasian
English
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