ABSTRACT
Southeast Asia’s (SEA) language habitats have always been influenced by languages from outside the region, such as from India, China, the Middle East or Europe. Thailand changed into a nation state and, while King Chulalongkorn continued to open the country further and to use English as a language of communication with the outside world, he restricted it use in education, favouring the spread of, and the promotion of literacy in, Thai. Though E. W. Schneider’s developmental model excludes non-former colonies altogether, some experts have applied it to a range of varieties of English in the region. English became the official language and main working language while Burmese dominated in other domains and continued, along with Chinese and Hindi, as a trade language. Like elsewhere in SEA, English was now the language of progress and modernity, a need for the country and it soon became the primary foreign language.
