Malawian English is the

English language English is a West Germanic language that developed in early medieval England and has since become a English as a lingua franca, global lingua franca. The namesake of the language is the Angles (tribe), Angles, one of the Germanic peoples th ...

as spoken in

Malawi Malawi, officially the Republic of Malawi, is a landlocked country in Southeastern Africa. It is bordered by Zambia to the west, Tanzania to the north and northeast, and Mozambique to the east, south, and southwest. Malawi spans over and ...

. English is the country's

official language An official language is defined by the Cambridge English Dictionary as, "the language or one of the languages that is accepted by a country's government, is taught in schools, used in the courts of law, etc." Depending on the decree, establishmen ...

Introduction

English was introduced into Malawi towards the end of the 19th century, due to the influence of British explorers, missionaries, the arrival of the African Lakes Corporation, and colonial administrators present since the establishment in the 1890s of the

British Central Africa Protectorate The British Central Africa Protectorate (BCA) was a British protectorate proclaimed in 1889 and ratified in 1891 that occupied the same area as present-day Malawi: it was renamed Nyasaland in 1907. British interest in the area arose from visits ...

. The seventy years of British colonial rule that followed the

Scramble for Africa The Scramble for Africa was the invasion, conquest, and colonialism, colonisation of most of Africa by seven Western European powers driven by the Second Industrial Revolution during the late 19th century and early 20th century in the era of ...

, set the groundwork for English to grow into the area's dominant and most socially prestigious language. One in a thousand people speak English as their first language, but it is essential to progress to secondary education.

Dominance

Since Malawian independence, the dominance of English has continued: * official government records are written in English, * parliament conducts its deliberations in English, * the laws of Malawi are written in English, * progression into secondary and

higher education Tertiary education (higher education, or post-secondary education) is the educational level following the completion of secondary education. The World Bank defines tertiary education as including universities, colleges, and vocational schools ...

requires certification of competence in English, * nearly all Malawian newspapers are published in English (though some include small Chichewa supplements), * English remains the language of commerce in the country. This remains true despite a large majority of Malawians speaking Chichewa and the small number of English speakers outside urban centres. Also, in Malawian government schools, students are taught in Chichewa, and learn English as a second language from about age 10. But in international schools in Malawi (like Saint Andrew's International High School in Blantyre) which follow the British curriculum, English is the language students are taught in, and do not learn Chichewa at all, as it is regarded as a local language.

Replacement of local vocabulary

English words are replacing their equivalents in other Malawi languages. One study of a

corpus Corpus (plural ''corpora'') is Latin for "body". It may refer to: Linguistics * Text corpus, in linguistics, a large and structured set of texts * Speech corpus, in linguistics, a large set of speech audio files * Corpus linguistics, a branch of ...

of Chichewa discourse captured over a ten-year period found that references to numbers greater than 3 were exclusively in English, at least in urban areas. See page 503
Abstract
is in HTML format.

Non-linguistic expressions

Malawian English features some non-linguistic expressions that are still used, such as "eesh!", an exclamation meaning "oh my!"

Notes

External links

Malawi's Ministry of Information and Tourism

Malawi SDNP
an
UNDP Malawi
supported by the

United Nations Development Programme The United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) is a United Nations agency tasked with helping countries eliminate poverty and achieve sustainable economic growth and human development. The UNDP emphasizes on developing local capacity towar ...

University of Malawi website
includin

Mzuzu University
Languages attested from the 19th century Languages of Malawi Dialects of English {{English-lang-stub