A history of the English Language

thou shalt 
write from an inkwell of your shoe and my head;
and modes of address such as 
cherisher 
of the poor, king of pearls, policewala, mother of my daughter
.
30
The future of English in 
India and the rest of South Asia will be determined by a complex set of social, political, 
and linguistic forces. The Indian Constitution of 1950 recognized fourteen Indian 
languages, of which Hindi was to be the first national language. English was to serve as a 
transitional language with Hindi until 1965, but it has continued to be used as an official 
language. Whatever the stated policies may be in the future, it is certain that the English 
language will be spoken and written by a small but influential minority of the Indian 
population, including leaders in government, education, and the press. It is also certain 
that the variety of English recognized as standard in India—and in Bangladesh and in 
Pakistan—will be a distinctively South Asian variety in its pronunciation, syntax, and 
vocabulary. It will continue to be affected
28 
Kanthapura
(1938; reprinted New York, 1963), p. vii. Cf. Noah Webster on American English, § 
246. 
29 
Braj B.Kachru, “South Asian English,” in Bailey and Görlach, p. 359. 
30 
Further examples are given in Braj B.Kachru, “The
 Indianness 
in Indian English,”
 Word,
21 
(1965), 391–410. 
The nineteenth century and after 307

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by the culture and native languages of South Asia, and in turn it will affect those 
languages and serve as the medium for Western influences on the culture. 
5. 
Singapore, Malaysia, Hong Kong.
The development of English as a second language in the Pacific rim is especially 
interesting because of the influence of background languages (the Chinese dialects 
Hokkien, Cantonese, and Mandarin; Malay; the southern Indian Tamil) and because of 
the effects of different language policies instituted by the various governments. 
Historically, the Malay peninsula has been among the most important trading areas of the 
world, the site of a productive if sometimes uneasy cultural mix of Chinese, Malays, 
Indians, and, since the sixteenth century, Europeans. The state of Malacca on the Malay 
peninsula was ruled by the Portuguese from 1511 to 1640, then by the Dutch, and, after 
1824, by the British. In 1819 Sir Stamford Raffles founded Singapore at the tip of the 
Malay peninsula, which together with Malacca and Penang became a British crown 
colony, the Straits Settlements. From the very beginning, Singapore prospered 
economically, and throughout the rest of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, English 
was an important language of government, business, and education. 
When independence came to the British colony in 1957 Singapore was originally 
federated with the Malaysian mainland and islands that surrounded it. The separation of 
the states two years later resulted partly from ethnic and cultural tensions between the 
Malays, who formed a majority of the population outside of Singapore, and the Chinese, 
who formed a majority of the population within Singapore. These different cultural 
settings are reflected in the subsequent history of the English language in the region. 
During the 1970s a national fervor in Malaysia brought about a policy of promoting 
Bahasa Malay as the official language, and the use of English declined rapidly. By the 
mid-1980s, however, it was clear that the advantages that had been gained in unifying the 
country’s diverse ethnic populations under a national language had been offset by the 
growing inability of Malaysians to read English, including scientific publications, and to 
compete internationally in commerce. A former vicechancellor of the University of 
Malaya described the situation: “You should sit among the students in the library. You 
see these people open the book and they don’t move the pages. And they’re looking 
awfully concerned.”
31
Recently, the Malaysian government has quietly begun to 
reemphasize English. 
In Singapore the changing relationship between English and the Asian languages has 
been in a sense the reverse of that in Malaysia. With English as
31 
Margot Cohen, “Malaysian Students Struggle to Cope with Language Shift,”