Schneider’s Dynamic Model of Postcolonial English.

This is a model devised by the Austrian-German linguist Edgar W. Schneider to account for the
development of English in former colonies of Britain. It stresses the manner in which overseas varieties
of English have evolved in specific ecologies and strives to account for how certain features have
emerged. Schneider’s dynamic model of post-colonial Englishes adopts an evolutionary perspective
emphasizing language ecologies .It shows how language evolves as a process of “competition-and-
selection “ , and how certain linguistic features emerge. The dynamic model illustrates how the
histories and ecologies will determine language structures in the different varieties of English, and how
linguistic and social identities are maintained. Contact occupies a central position in Schneider’s model,
both between dialects present among settlers as well as between English speakers and those of
indigenous language at various colonial locations. Contact-induced change produce different result
depending on the social and demographic conditions under which it took place, i.e. on the local ecology,
and on its linguistic triggers, e.g. code-switching, code-alternation, bilingualism or non-prescriptive adult
language acquisition.
Historical Background:
The model was first presented as an article in Language (Schneider 2003) and later in more detailed
form in the monograph Postcolonial English (Schneider 2007).This model assumes former colonies went
through various stages which can lead ultimately to the development and differentiation of independent
endonormative varieties of English ,though this stage has not been reached in all classes. Schneider also
purposes that there is a shared underlying process driving the formation of postcolonial Englishes, a
unilateral casual implication as follow:
sociohistorical background identify of early groups sociolinguistics conditions of communication and
contact resulting feature of the emerging post-colonial variety.
Underlying principles:
Five underlying principles underscore the Dynamic Model:

1. The closer the contact, or higher the degree of bilingualism or multilingualism in a community,
the stronger the effect of contact.
2. The structural effects of language contact depends on social conditions. Therefore history will
play an important part.
3. Contact-induced changes can be achieved by a variety of mechanisms, from code-switching to
code-alternation to acquisition strategies.
4. Language evolution, and the emergence of contact-induced varieties, can be regarded as
speaker making selection from a pool of linguistic variants made available to them.
Which features will be ultimately adopted on the complete “ecology” of the contact situation,
including factors such as demography, social relationship, and surface similarities between
languages etc.