And is it English?

Varieties of English defined by users (as dialects, sociolects and chronolects) andby uses (according to medium, formality, text type, etc.) have been the object ofdescription in various places, and have of course functioned conspicuously in thisjournal which has the topic as part of its title. By contrast, the questions of whatcan be considered English, and how its outer boundaries are defined, have beenasked less frequently, and not in any comprehensive way. (In EWW I havefollowed a pragmatic editorial course in admitting varieties which have somelinguistic relationship with English and are in a contact situation/coexistence withEnglish in the speech community discussed.) My paper looks at a few 'problemcases' among utterances, in particular at various forms of broken English andlinguistic experiments, at language mix and code-switching and then turns tolinguistic systems, with semi-languages, pidgins, creoles, cants and mixed languagessingled out for detailed discussion. A classification of the varieties treatedobviously depends on the degree of their divergence from English, their functionalrange and standardization, users' attitudes and the ways how the language isacquired — four factors which can have different weight for the classification inthe individual case.