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2000 BCE
East Anglian English
East Anglia is a region of eastern England consisting of the counties of Norfolk, Suffolk, and parts of Essex and Cambridgeshire.East Anglian English is still spoken today in northeastern Essex, Norfolk, and Suffolk. -
300 BCE
Anglo-Saxon
n the case of English we can at least say that there is little sense in speaking of the English language as a separate entity before the Anglo-Saxons came to Britain. Little is known of this period with any certainty, but we do know that Germanic invaders came and settled in Britain from the north-western coastline of continental Europe in the fifth and sixth centuries. -
South Africa English
arrival of the British at the Cape of Good Hope in 1795. As was the case in most British colonies, English was introduced first by soldiers and administrators, then by missionaries, settlers, and fortune-seekers. English took root during the 19th century as a southern African language, as a result of the British settlements of 1820 (in the Eastern Cape), 1848–51 (in Natal), and the subsequent rushes to the diamond mines of Kimberley and the gold mines of theWitwatersrand. -
Australian English
ustralian English differs from other Englishes primarily in its accent and vocabulary. The major features of the accent were established by the 1830s. In the period between colonial settlement (1788) and the 1830s, when the foundation accent was being forged, new lexical items to describe the new environment were developed either from Aboriginal languages (coolibah, wombat, wallaby, waratah, and so on) or from the ‘transported’ English word stock (native bear, wild cherry, and so on). -
Canadian English
Canadian English was a severely understudied national variety of English. Sociolinguistic data has been especially hard to come by and, until the mid-1990s, was virtually inexistent. Some commentators tend to confuse Canadian English with American dialects. Comparisons of degrees of difference are always relative: while a localEast Anglian English speaker may confuse a Torontonian for an American, Canadians usually have little difficulty telling the one from the other.
