English was shaped in England through contact with other languages -- particularly Latin, French and Scandinavian languages. This process is called language contact. During expansion, English came into contact with Celtic in Britain and N ative American languages in America. People began speaking different varieties of English as they formed colonies. The colonization led to varieties of English being used including distinctive grammar, pronunciation and vocabulary.

Central to the process of expansion was colonization - establishment of colonies made up of English speakers who maintained economic and cultural links with England. The colonies of English speakers also positioned themselves in a relation of po wer with the inhabitants that lived in the colony prior to the expansion of English.

The process of colonization began in the British Isles when English became the main language of the Celtic-speaking territories of Ireland, Scotland and Wales. A common sequence of events occurred in each colony where English emerged as a m ain language: original settlement by English speakers, political incorporation and nationalist reaction that might have led to independence.

Colonization was a Europe-wide phenomenon partly motivated by rivalries among European states: at first, the Portuguese and Spanish, then the Dutch, the French and then the Germans. Three types of English colonies existed:

• Like America or Australia - substantial settlement by first-language speakers of English displaced the precolonial population.
• Like Nigeria - sparser colonial settlements maintained the precolonial population in subjection and allowed a proportion of them access to learning English as a second or additional language.
• Like Barbados and Jamaica - precolonial population was replaced by new labor from somewhere else (mainly West Africa) - led to pidgins and creoles.

Originally, colonists were subjects of England, economically dependent on, and controlled by the mother country. Linguistically, this meant that the usage of England remained a powerful model. From the 18^th century on, different forms of nat ionalist activity characterized political life in many of the areas colonized by the English. Language figured prominently in such nationalist reaction: in some cases, the precolonial language provided a focus for the assertion of a separatist identity, i n others this role of English was played by English itself.

By the end of the 19^th century the newly emerging nationalisms in Ireland, Scotland and Wales were beginning to fear for the survival of the Celtic languages, and campaigns were mounted to promote them. One consequence of this is that they b ecame taught languages, learned by may people who otherwise knew only English.

One of the most noteworthy linguistic consequences of colonization was the appearance of new varieties of English worldwide. Some of these remain local languages of relatively low social status. Others have become codified, standardized or adop ted by newly independent states as an official or main language. In North America and Australia, where Europeans largely displaced the precolonial populations, the influence of the original local languages on English was slight - usually restricted to the adoption of words relating to the phenomena of new to the Europeans, such as local cultural practices, animals and geographical features.

English-speaking settlers formed a diverse group of people. Many came from lowly social positions in England but found themselves in a position of power in relation to the original, precolonial populations. The restructuring of social identity is a typical colonial process and applies to both the incoming European community and to members of the precolonial population who become incorporated into the colonial system. The mixed demographic background of early settlers suggests that the varieties of English taken to the colonies were diverse and often nonstandard. A process of dialect levelling occurs - when differences between speakers tend over time to erode.

However, internal differentiation - where different areas developed a sense of local cultural and linguistic identity also occurred. When a language is imposed on a community as part of a colonial process, speakers tend to incorporate many l inguistic features from their first language when speaking the new, imposed one.

It is sometimes claimed that many of the differences between the American and British English can be explained in terms of a colonial lag, that the language of colonial settlers is more conservative than that of the country they left. As English se ttlements in North America became more established, there arose another tendency towards internal differentiation. The different economy of the southern area, for example, gradually pulled its culture and speech habits in a different direction from that o f the north.

Another source of differentiation is the diversity in the American population since the late 18^th century. Newcomers were to form what is often called the melting pot of American society, in which ethnic origin is subsumed by the common American citizenship; in practice, however, new composite identities such as Irish American and Italian American have been created, and European cultural practices maintained.

In the course of the 20^th century some observers have come to see this ethnic diversity as a threat to the nation. Recent Spanish-speaking immigrants from Mexico have confronted the states of Texas and California with the language of the earliest European colonists in American and reminded them that the USA has no official national language in the legal sense.

The long-term effect of the slave trade on the development of the English language during colonization is immense. It gave rise not only to black English in the United States and the Caribbean, which as been an important influence on the sp eech of young English speakers worldwide, but also provided the context of language contact which led to the formation of English pidgins and creoles. During this time, a precolonial population is replaced by a new labor from elsewhere, mainly West Africa.

It is not known what languages they spoke, or even whether they had any language in common, but it is possible that they had some knowledge of a simplified language used between Africans and the Portuguese for the purposes of trade. This kind of ma keshift language is called a pidgin. Throughout the world people have shown remarkable ingenuity in creating such languages for limited forms of interaction where no common language is available. Pidgins typically have a small vocabulary and little grammatical complexity, and often depend heavily on context for understanding. They occur when limited communication is required between speakers who have no language in common.

Many linguists have taken the view that the policy of the slave traders was to bring people of different language backgrounds together in ships to make it difficult to plot rebellion. If this view is accepted then pidgin would have been the only fo rm of communication available to slaves on new plantations, and over the generations the African languages they spoke would have been abandoned. But since pidgin had only been used for very simple kinds of interaction, its vocabulary and grammar would hav e been limited. So it would have needed extending and adapting. Once it had been passed on to the children of slaves, and used by them as a first language, it would have become a creole.