The Dynamics of New Englishes: From Identity Construction to Dialect Birth

So-called new englishes, distinct forms of English which have emerged in postcolonial settings and countries around the globe, have typically been regarded individually, as unique varieties shaped by idiosyncratic historical conditions and contact settings, and no coherent theory to account for these processes has been developed so far. This article argues that despite all obvious dissimilarities, a fundamentally uniform developmental process, shaped by consistent sociolinguistic and language-contact conditions, has operated in the individual instances of rerooting the English language in another territory. At the heart of this process there are characteristic stages of identity construction by the groups…