A sociolinguistic ecology of colonial Britain

In this chapter, I look at the sociolinguistic context that colonists, settlers, pioneers, convicts, and others left when embarking on their travels. It does not therefore look at the migrants themselves or their linguistic profiles per se but at the social and linguistic ecology of Britain at the time colonization began. Its aim, therefore, is, for the colonial period that peaked in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, to sensitize the reader to some of the critical domains that shaped the prevailing linguistic landscape: multilingualism and multidialectalism in Britain; patterns of internal mobility and their linguistic consequences; the British education system and literacy before compulsory education and prevailing language ideologies, and the implications they had for the language use in the British Isles.