The Handbook of World Englishes, 2nd Edition

11South American Englishes and Englishes in South America

PATRICIA FRIEDRICH

1 Introduction

In 2003, Margie Berns and I organized a special issue of World Englishes about English in South America (Berns & Friedrich 2003). At the time, we referred to the region as “The other forgotten continent,” an allusion to the fact that both Africa and South America seemed to receive comparatively less attention than other parts of the world when it came to several areas of sociological and linguistic research. Both regions are also subject to descriptions that tend to be homogenizing and that often disregard the immense diversity – linguistic, ethnic, cultural, musical, geographic, and climatic – that they boast.

Such diversity is intuitive: Africa has an area of 11 million square miles and South America almost 7 million. It is hard to imagine that from the cool beach in Angola to the golden savanna in Kenya, and from the rainy Amazon forest to the icy Argentine Patagonia, people would all be living life, using language, and expressing themselves in the same way.

With regard to South America, diversity is definitely the rule, which makes a synthesis of language relations and English presence there a challenge. Different countries and different regions display this diversity through populations that are an organic combination of the contributions of their original inhabitants (notably from the Tupi‐Guarani family of languages and Quechua, for example), immigrating people (at first Portuguese ...