World Englishes

...

if that's the reason, but one thing that I was also told was there were a lot of different Englishes that, you know, like, there is not one set, um, English that the enslaved people were exposed to as well.

So when we're talking about people from the UK, like depending on where they're from, you hear how their accents differ.

Mm-hmm.

There are all sorts of English variants as well.

including a New Zealand English, a couple Australian Englishes, a couple which I have, Indian English, all kinds of different ones.

There's an Irish English named Shannon that I really like.

So you will definitely find your favorites in these voices, and they are tremendously responsive.

So, and that's what happens.

That happens a lot in World Englishes, but maybe just not in the scale of all English speakers adopting these words.

Mm.

So sometimes it's just a specific community who, you know, have this specific kind of dish that's part of their vocabulary that they decide that, okay, we're going to borrow these words from these other languages that we speak, and we're going to use it even when we're, we're speaking in English.

And in fact, you know, one of, um, another important component of our, the World English Program is, you know, is for us, is for the OED to reach out [laughs] to the world.

So, so part, a, a big part of my job is traveling to different countries to talk about our work on World Englishes or to work with collaborating institutions-

Mm

... or researchers in, in places outside of the UK.

I agree.

I think it'll always be there because people always do want to identify a little bit where they're from or have their in language or regional things, right? But overall with globalization, there's a lot more exchange between all the Englishes.

And so we start using the dominant ones in film, in TV, in social media.

And Christians sometimes... people ask me, should I learn US English or British English? And as you said, hold on, there are many types of US or British English here, right? So what are we talking about? And there are many other Englishes.

But if you just give me those two, I would always say, well, look, it doesn't really matter because most of the time, as we say, it doesn't matter.

But I do think that British speakers know the American English words a bit more than the other way around.

I am your host, Josh Linsk.

This show is part of History Podcasts, where you can discover more podcasts at historypodcasts.com. Today, we're diving into World Englishes, how colonial footnotes turned into global voices, and why local varieties aren't just accents, but full-fledged systems.

Now, let's get into the story behind today's topic.

World Englishes was first coined in the late '70s, a time when scholars started questioning whether the English spoken across former colonies was merely a shadow of British standard or something with its own legitimacy.

The idea was that each local variety, Indian, Nigerian, Singaporean, is a fully fledged language system shaped by history and community.

It's pretty wild how quickly this notion gained traction in linguistic circles.

In India, for instance, you can hear Hindi nouns stuck into English sentences.

In Nigeria, Pidgin English evolved alongside Standard English to express concepts that colonial vocabulary missed.

Now in a minute is one of six words or phrases from Wales, or from the Welsh language, which appear in the latest update of the Oxford English Dictionary.

Danica Salazar is executive editor at the OED's World Englishes programme.

In the Oxford English Dictionary, we have a program that looks specifically at words that come from different varieties of English spoken all over the world.

So those varieties are known collectively as world Englishes.

So as you know, the English language has now become a global language that's spoken in different countries all across the globe.

And each one of these varieties have their own characteristic vocabulary, their characteristic accents.