The title of this chapter points to the frequent use of the word ‘we’ in Brexit discourse before and after the referendum. The pronoun ‘we’ in Brexitspeak almost always serves the exclusion of other nations or those in the domestic arena perceived as enemies of ‘the people’. Three different cases of the uses of ‘we’ are examined, each of which in their different ways shows how ‘we’ expressed an exclusionary notion of national identity. One of these cases shows how Brexitspeak persisted in the years after the referendum, and included the long-standing idea, at all levels of society, that ‘we’ speak only English. The second case is the 2013 speech by the then prime minister David Cameron, who favoured remaining in the EU. That speech, which announced the referendum, was apparently intended to placate the Eurosceptics and neutralise UKIP’s attractiveness. The speech repeatedly used ‘we’, embedded in an exceptionalist narrative of British greatness. Cameron’s speech failed in its aims and in fact boosted national-populist discourse. It was in tune with Farage’s own speeches of the same year, which is the third case of Brexiter ‘we’ examined in this chapter.

The British colonial invasion of the territories that would come to constitute the nation-state of Nigeria also planted the seeds for the birth of nationalist and anticolonial movements. This chapter traces the advent and growth of Nigerian nationalism across its different phases, beginning with the immediate aftermath of the colonial invasion until the period of the 1940s. This showed how the seeds of nationalist consciousness were sown in the resistance of traditional rulers to the colonial attacks on their political authority and territorial integrity. It also showed how the alliances of these rulers with emerging Western-educated elites formed the core of the struggles against the colonial administration in the post-amalgamation period. The chapter pays attention to a variety of internal and external factors, ranging from aggressive taxation and unrepresentative government to discrimination in the civil service, Western education, and the work of Christian missionaries. It traces three kinds of formations: political organizations such as the People’s Union, the NNDP and the Nigerian Youth Movement; media outlets such as the Lagos Times and the West African Pilot; and pan-African organizations like the NCBWA.

For over fifty years, Canada’s language regime has centered - in theory, policy, and practice - on a binary: linguistic duality and authority of the two settler colonial powers, English and French. The legislative enshrinement of status for these colonial languages, by way of the 1969 Official Languages Act, has on most accounts failed in multiple ways. As is well documented, legislated equality between French and English has rarely manifested itself in practice. Less attention - scholarly or political - has been paid to the Indigenous languages erased by both political discourse and public policy in Canada. What limited policy attention there has been has focused on Indigenous languages as second languages. The development of the Canadian Parliament’s Indigenous Languages Act, launched by the Government of Canada on December 5, 2016, attempted to fill this gap. Analysis of this process reveals the tensions within Canada’s established language regime, while putting into sharp relief the difficulties of policy and policymakers to attend to - and move beyond - Canada’s colonial past and framework.

Many academic and media accounts of the massive spread of English across the globe since the mid-twentieth century rely on simplistic notions of globalization mostly driven by technology and economic developments. Such approaches neglect the role of states across the globe in the increased usage of English and even declare individual choice as a key factor (e.g., De Swaan, 2001; Crystal, 2003; Van Parijs, 2011; Northrup, 2013). This chapter challenges these accounts by using and extending the state traditions and language regimes framework, STLR (Cardinal & Sonntag, 2015). Presenting empirical findings that 142 countries in the world mandate English language education as part of their national education systems, it is suggested there are important similarities with the standardization of national language at the nation-state level especially in the nineteenth century and early twentieth centuries. This work reveals severe limitations of other approaches in political science to global English, including linguistic justice. It is shown how in the case of global English the convergence of diverse language regimes must be distinguished from state traditions but cannot be separated from them. With the severe challenges to global liberal cosmopolitanism, the role of individual state language education policies will become increasingly important.

This chapter is divided into three main sections. The first proposes the Ten Teacher Questions framework. This set of questions is designed to provide you with a generic framework for critical enquiry into all your pedagogical choices, and to connect your pedagogical knowledge to what you have learned in previous chapters. The second section provides the curriculum context structures ‒ that is, the ACARA Cross-curriculum Priorities and General Capabilities, which inform our work. The third section presents Teaching Ideas in Mathematics, The Arts and English. Our key message is not that you must implement every Teaching Idea! Instead, we hope the examples will consolidate a practical approach to harnessing the linguistic diversity of your students. We hope that you will grasp the principles which you can see at work in the Teaching Ideas, and the way that they respond to one or more of the Ten Teacher Questions.

We have analyzed many variables in Cantonese but not in other languages: classifier specialization, tone mergers, vowel splits and mergers, motion event expression, and (L > R), as well as (VOT) and (PRODROP). As little sociolinguistic work on any variety of this globally large language exists, these studies serve as useful models to expand variationist studies to languages that vary in many ways from the North American, Indo-European languages of focus to date. We show that classifiers are developing a specific semantic contrast (for number-marking) in Heritage Cantonese, amplifying a homeland trend; that three tone mergers that were reported to be completed are only partial, in both homeland and heritage varieties; that some vowel mergers and splits may be attributed to influence from English, but that changes in the constraints governing motion event expression cannot be attributed to simplification or English-contact effects. We report on covariation among the variables, showing that it is not the case that the same speakers lead change in each. Thus, it is not easy to claim that language proficiency or patterns of use are responsible for the variation. Rather, internal change and identity-marking motivations for change must be considered.

Chapter 26 explores the role of the English language and the culture of Britain on Goethe’s development. The influences began in his childhood, and became particularly significant in his twenties, owing not least to his friendship with Herder and their shared enthusiasm for Shakespeare and Ossian. The chapter also emphasises the importance of visitors from Britain in furthering Goethe’s knowledge of a country to which he never travelled himself, and examines his relationship with contemporary British writers, above all Byron and Carlyle. It closes with an overview of the reception of Goethe in Britain.

This chapter explores the tensions produced by Vaughan Williams’s desire to make a significant contribution to English cultural life as a leading composer while also not discussing his compositions in any detail in a public forum. Vaughan Williams conceived a path for himself as a musical activist, leading practical amateur music-making, while creating new works that reflected his community. Yet the experience of his first large-scale premiere, A Sea Symphony, at the Leeds Musical Festival in 1910, revealed that public attention, while necessary, could also be discomforting.

In private, Vaughan Williams was more relaxed: he was the centre of attention at parties and enjoyed the company of younger women, with whom he sometimes flirted under the nickname of ‘Uncle Ralph’. He was also deeply committed to his composition pupils, supporting them in ways that went far beyond any contractual responsibility, and often enjoyed working with conductors preparing his new works. Yet public scrutiny was always a source of anxiety, even in his final years. Coping strategies, including avoidance and deflection, enabled Vaughan Williams to navigate the public demands of his role while focusing on the process of composition.

Despite being inundated with publications on the subject historians today feel less confident than ever that they truly understand the Reformation. The prevalence of national paradigms, such as ‘confessionalisation’ in German Reformation studies and ‘revisionism’ in English Reformation studies, encourages scholars to focus their attention on local circumstances and on specific individuals in those localities without due attention to the bigger picture. The sheer volume of case-studies being generated risks the loss of an overall perspective, and threatens to obscure the magnitude and significance of the Reformation as a European phenomenon of the first order. It is critically important to appreciate the continental scale of the Reformation because it reflected the scale and severity of the crisis of authority that beset the Catholic Church during the half-century or so following Fr Martin Luther’s announcement of the sola scriptura principle. That crisis cannot be explained by reference to local circumstances only. It went to the very heart of the institution, and it posed an existential threat to the Catholic Church. Reformation historians have yet to explain convincingly why Luther’s challenge resonated with such devastating effects across the continent. This collection of essays reflects the impact of the Reformation across Europe and offers explanations of its impact.

In mainland China, Reform and Opening up in the last few decades has opened a floodgate of foreign infusion. Foreign businesses such as KFC, Starbucks, Walmart, McDonalds, and Carrefour are seen everywhere. There have also been many loanwords. Some of the loanwords have become so much a part of the Chinese lexicon that their foreign origin may not even be clear to all. Apart from the social and cultural implications, the influx of things foreign presents quite a challenge to Chinese with its non-phonetic script. Various accommodation strategies have been used to represent foreign words with Chinese characters, including meaning translation, phonetic transliteration, or a combination of both, resulting in varying degrees of semantic and phonetic approximation. Incidentally, the fact that the Rebus (phonetic loan) Principle is extensively used for phonetic transliterations, whereby Chinese characters are used only for their sounds without regard to their meanings, gives the lie to the persistent ideographic myth concerning Chinese characters.

The 1860s is a decade that, in many ways, marks the death of the Victorian era and the start of a long modernism. Certainly for British poetry, the 1860s marks a moment of historical retrospection, summation, and definition, and, simultaneously, the start of a new poetry of Why is this spelled out?modernity. The year 1861 marked Prince Albert’s death but also a landmark publication that is often overlooked because of ital its popular status: Palgrave’s Golden Treasury, which was to remain a definitive articulation of the lyric tradition in English poetry for at least a century. Yet the same decade also saw the publication (in 1866) of a volume of poetry that was crucial in opening the door to a new kind of poetry in English: Swinburne’s ital 1866 Poems and Ballads (First Series). This chapter explores the nature and importance of Palgrave’s historical anthology in counterpoint with the birth of a striking new aestheticist poetry.

This section contains examples of four wills made by members of the laity, both men and women, at the end of the fourteenth and beginning of the fifteenth centuries. This is a genre of which many examples survive in local records and in episcopal registers. Here one can see the kind of things that people would leave to their relatives or to the poor, from domestic articles, often associated with their profession, and clothes, to sums of money.