Varieties of English arose during the colonial period (roughly 1600-1900) at a number of different overseas locations. The specific situations of dialect contact and mixture and the sociolinguistic scenarios which obtained at these locations were instrumental in the variety profiles which resulted. Contact between dialects happened because of the different sources of emigrants to key locations such as Canada or New Zealand and from the status of these groups in the British colonies where they settled. In recent decades there have been several studies of how the varieties, which can now be observed in the modern Anglophone countries throughout the world, achieved the profiles they show. These studies throw light on the nature of language contact and the outcomes it engenders.

The rise of standard forms of language for both the English- and the Spanish-speaking worlds is a development which benefits from contrast. Both languages spread overseas, with national standards arising during the later colonial period through a process of supraregionalization by which local varieties lost strong vernacular features and came to function as non-stigmatized, publically accepted varieties. However, the details of these developments are different and the cultural attitudes to varieties spoken in the source countries in Europe vary considerably, determining the ways in which standards are viewed and used in both the Anglophone and the Hispanophone worlds.

The spread of English during the colonial period (ca. 1600–1900) led to the rise of different overseas varieties. The shape of these varieties was determined by a series of factors, such as the number of settlers, the relationship of regional dialects with this group, contact with other populations, the possible existence of pidgins, and later the rise of creoles at overseas locations. In the postcolonial period, the situation changed radically with former colonies continuing on a path toward indigenous varieties with profiles of their own and with an increasing effect of transnational factors and a reorientation away from Britain-based models of English toward an America-based one.

English is a presence which cannot be denied in so many countries of today’s world (Schneider 2017, 2020) and hence it is not a matter of whether it has an influence on non-English speaking countries but what the scale and nature of this influence is (Hilgendorf 2007). In the German-speaking world there is an asymmetrical relationship between English and German despite the undisputed status of German as a major European language. With many languages there is often a resistance in society to the overwhelming influence of English, and in Germany there have been, and still are, ideological debates surrounding the many borrowings from English into German (see Mair, this volume, for instance). The extent of the influence exercised by English varies across different social domains, it being particularly strong in areas such as advertising, technology and science, though for different reasons. While in advertising the use of English is supposed to index sophistication and urbanity, for technology and science (Ammon 2004) its use derives from source research and innovation which is already embedded in an English-language context. In wider social areas, in the domestic and familiar domains, the occurrence of English is less obvious as it is confined to lexical items transferred to German. However, it is these larger domains which determine whether English material used in a German context will actually become established as permanent borrowings. Here language attitudes and comprehension issues in the initial appearance of English lexis shape the reality of language use.

In this chapter a range of features will be discussed which are persistent in the pronunciation of second-language German speakers of English. The majority of these features can be traced to structural influence from German, and hence it is worthwhile asking the question whether, in their cumulative effect, the features constitute a second-language variety in its own right which could be labelled ‘German English’. The use of this two-word label would imply that this form of English was comparable with native-language varieties like New Zealand English or Canadian English. After a detailed presentation of the various features this issue will be re-addressed and further discussed below.