The folk magical traditions that colonists brought with them from England assumed that men and women could manipulate supernatural forces for their own ends. Cunning folk used a variety of fortune-telling techniques that they learned from manuals that circulated on both sides of the Atlantic. Yet neither magical beliefs nor magical practices were gender-specific: men as well as women resorted to and functioned as cunning folk. As English colonists turned to magic in hopes of divining the future, curing ailments, and protecting themselves or their loved ones from harm, their options were not limited to English techniques and English cunning folk. Although witchcraft prosecutions occurred throughout the British colonies in North America, the powerful influence of religious culture in New England produced a disproportionate number of cases and thus a disproportionate amount of information about magical beliefs and techniques. The assumption underlying folk magic contrasted sharply with the teachings of Puritan theology, which placed supernatural power firmly in God's hands.

This introductory chapter provides overview of the book and the subsequent chapters. The subsequent chapters give an account of the history and development of a number of distinct and highly diversified varieties of English those varieties in varying degrees are recognisably different from one another and from standard British and standard American English. In Wales and Ireland the retreat of the mother-tongue Celtic languages has been less dramatic but has followed the same general pattern. In each case an originally monolingual community, for social and political reasons, gradually acquired a second language, namely English, for commercial, administrative and other business. In due course the retreat of Welsh and Irish reached a point where the number of monolingual English speakers exceeded the number of bilingual speakers. The transported Englishes of three of the former British colonies, namely South Africa, Australia and New Zealand, were, to begin with, those of 'emigrant communities speaking several different dialects'.