Varieties of English

As most of people know the English language is not only being spoken in the Anglo-American core area, but also in several other places and countries in the world. English is the most widely spoken language on our planet, but this includes those who have English as their first, second and third language. English is today the most international language in the world, and we can see numerous reasons for that. I think one of the main reasons for this is that England had a great colonization period which started in the late 15^th century, and they established many colonies all over the world.

For example the English colonized in many sugar-rich Caribbean islands. Today this has resulted in that people here speak English, but of course there is a great deal of variation in the way it is spoken. We can take Jamaica as an example. Here it has developed in two types of English; Jamaican English and Jamaican Creole. These two kinds of English is used differently in dissimilar situations. The Creole language is used as a “day-to-day” language for the Jamaican population. We can see examples for this in different kinds of music. Reggae is a mentionable example here. The Jamaican English is the language which is used in the newspapers and the language spoken in school etc.

One of the old colonies of the British Empire is India, and today English is one of the official languages in the country with at least 90 million speakers. There are a lot of varieties and dialects of the English in India, it is a huge country with about a billion inhabitants. But despite some of the varieties there are still some features we can call typical Indian English. For example their use of “ing- form” and their rhythm while speaking the language is very unlike the rhythm used in US and UK English. This can make Indian English very difficult to understand for foreigners.

There are also some countries in Africa which have English as their official language, Kenya, South Africa and Nigeria are examples. But if we take South Africa as an example, we can see that this country has eleven different official languages! A reason for this is the country’s diversity in cultures and languages. I thought before reading about it, that everyone in South Africa spoke English, but after doing some research I found out that in 2001 only 8.2 percent of the population in South Africa speak English.

We don’t know the correct number of how many people in the world who speak English, but we know that there are plenty of them. I think the number of people speaking English will increase even more the next years, because I think this language I a great part of our future. The world’s future, working together to achieve our common goals.

- Rikke