Summary

Among the Germanic languages, particularly English but also Dutch as well as German were transported to territories outside their ancestral homes during colonization activities, instantiating the respective foundations of postcolonial forms of Dutch, English, and German. The spread of Dutch was facilitated via the Dutch West India Company and the Dutch East India Company, chartered companies that put Dutch trade relations more firmly on an international level. As evident from Mauritius, parts of India, or Sri Lanka, for example, trade did not remain the only Dutch interest in that these territories also fell under Dutch colonial rule. The diffusion of English, resulting in its current status of (one of) the most important language(s) worldwide, operated on a similar pattern since the British East India Company was equally instrumental in boosting British trade activities around the globe, but also in expanding the British Empire particularly toward the east after the first westbound wave of colonization, thus constructing a massive network of colonies, protectorates, and trading posts. In comparison to when the British Empire reached its territorial climax, the set of German colonies was notably smaller in that it encapsulated different Southwest and East African regions as well as territories in the Western Pacific and what are Papua New Guinea and Micronesia in the early 21st century.

Driven by the resulting recurrent contacts with the local languages, the feature pools of Dutch, English, and German were systematically expanded, offering speakers of these languages an increasingly large number of linguistic choices in a given communicative context. The longer the contact between the languages of the colonial powers and the indigenous languages persisted, the more likely the sociolinguistic and structural localization/indigenization of the colonial languages became, culminating in region-specific linguistic usage patterns and forms that outlive the endings of the respective colonial eras. In this light, a systematic account of localized facets of Dutch, English, and German in postcolonial settings with a view to different levels of language organization as well as of relevant sociolinguistic models of their development seems timely.