The British Empire and the Spread of the English Language: A Global History

The English language, the most widely spoken language in the world today, owes its global position in significant measure to the history of the British Empire and to the 20th-century economic dominance of the United States. The story of the spread of English is the story of a small Germanic tongue that became the dominant language of settlement colonies, the official language of imperial administration, and the international language of trade, science, and culture. The history of the language and the history of empire cannot be told separately. (For a discussion of the contemporary consequences, see The English Language as an Imperial Legacy.)

The English Language in Early Modern England

The English language reached its early modern form by the sixteenth century, with the works of Shakespeare, the King James Bible of 1611, and the establishment of a London-based standard in speech and writing. The expansion of the English language overseas began with the seventeenth-century settlements in North America and the Caribbean: the Jamestown colony of 1607, the English Caribbean colonisation of the 1620s, and the Massachusetts Bay Colony of 1630 all established English-speaking communities. By the late seventeenth century, the standardisation of English in grammar books and dictionaries, notably Samuel Johnson’s 1755 Dictionary of the English Language, had created a recognisable modern language. This was the English that would be carried around the world in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

The Spread of English Through the Colonies

The British colonisation of the Americas, the Caribbean, Australia, New Zealand, and parts of Africa and Asia established English as the dominant language in much of the world. The settlement colonies produced the largest numbers of native English speakers, with the discovery and settlement of Australia and the settlement of New Zealand creating two new English-speaking nations. In the plantation colonies of the Caribbean, English was the language of the planter class and the administration. The missionary schools in West Africa produced a small but significant Western-educated elite. The Welsh-speaking populations of the early modern period, together with the Gaelic-speaking Highlands and the Cornish-speaking south-west, were absorbed into English-language institutions through education, migration, and economic coercion — a useful reminder that the language was itself an instrument of imperial incorporation well before the overseas empire was built.

English in India and Africa

The British presence in India made English the language of administration, higher education, and the courts. The decisive moment was Lord Macaulay’s 1835 “Minute on Indian Education,” which established English as the language of higher education: “We must at present do our best to form a class who may be interpreters between us and the millions whom we govern — a class of persons, Indian in blood and colour, but English in tastes, in opinions, in morals, and in intellect.” The universities of Calcutta, Bombay, and Madras, founded in 1857, were English-medium institutions. The post-independence retention of English as an “associate official language” was a decision of enormous consequence: Indian English is now one of the largest varieties of English in the world, spoken as a second language by tens of millions of Indians. As the linguist Braj Kachru argued in The Other Tongue (1992), Indian English is not a debased colonial inheritance but “a legitimate, autonomous variety of English, with its own literary, scientific, and journalistic traditions.”

In Africa, the British colonisation of much of sub-Saharan Africa introduced English as the language of administration and education. The colonial universities of Accra, Ibadan, Makerere, and the Rhodesias produced the Western-educated African elites that would lead the post-independence states. The contemporary African English varieties, from Nigerian English to East African English to South African English, are now among the most distinctive in the world. Chinua Achebe’s 1975 decision to write in English — “the language of the coloniser” — and his argument that “I have been given this language by history” became the most influential statement of the post-colonial linguistic position.

The American Contribution and Global English

The rise of the United States in the twentieth century reinforced the global position of English. American cultural exports, from Hollywood films to popular music, have reinforced the global reach of English, and American economic dominance has been accompanied by the spread of American English as the prestige variety. The dominance of English in international diplomacy dates from the founding of the League of Nations after the First World War, continued by the United Nations, and entrenched by the 1946 ICAO decision making English the international language of civil aviation.

The dominance of English in international business and finance is a direct consequence of British and American economic dominance. The City of London and Wall Street became the principal centres of international finance, and the use of English in the principal financial markets has reinforced the global position of the language. The post-1945 American dominance of scientific publishing, particularly in the physical and biomedical sciences, was accompanied by the dominance of English as the language of international science. The digital age has reinforced this pattern: the internet’s protocols and standards are English-language, and the principal research databases and journals operate in English.

Historiographical Note

The history of English as a global language is unusually well-served by scholarly literature. David Crystal’s English as a Global Language (2003) remains the standard account. Robert McCrum’s The Story of English (1986) and the BBC’s accompanying television series did the most to popularise the history. The post-1990 scholarship, in the tradition of Kachru, Larry Smith, and Yamuna Kachru, developed the “World Englishes” paradigm, which has done the most to displace the older deficit model of non-metropolitan varieties. More recent work, including the essays collected in The Routledge Companion to the History of English (2018) and the Cambridge History of the English Language (1992–2001), has stressed the post-colonial agency of non-metropolitan Englishes. The most useful critical accounts — including Salikoko Mufwene’s The Ecology of Language Evolution (2001) and the work of Aneta Pavlenko — have stressed the economic and political conditions under which English became global, and have resisted the celebratory tone of much of the older literature.

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