ABSTRACT
This chapter begins with an account of changes in European society in the early modern period as background to the overseas expansion of English. It reviews the subsequent establishment of new centers of linguistic diffusion in North America and the Southern Hemisphere. The chapter recounts the establishment of the slave trade and its effect on English. It mentions the effects of social change on language in the course of widespread education and urbanization. The chapter shows the establishment of General English in contrast to the traditional dialects. It observes the transplantation of English under the conditions of emigration and immigration as well as language imposition. All of the European possessions in America, as elsewhere, were initially part of the system of mercantilism, which sought national-imperial self-sufficiency by tying the colonial producers of staples to the homeland-metropolis via trade. The slave trade was a source of wealth; and most of the slaves went to the West Indies.
