This survey of East African English (EAfE) focuses on Kenya, Uganda, and Tanzania, which are often seen as the core of East Africa. The varieties of English used there are considered typical ESL varieties, part of the New Englishes and of Kachru's (1986) Outer Circle. The terminology depends more on ideological stance than on "linguistic facts": the "conservative" view emphasizes the common core and acknowledged "standards," the "progressive" view cherishes the diversity of actual usage and the cultural and linguistic innovations. This presentation tries to abstract from some well-known linguistic facts and to leave the interpretations to the readers, their languagepolitical preferences, and attitudes (cf. Chapter 35, this volume).Kenya, Uganda, and Tanzania share a long, common "Anglophone" background, despite some interesting differences in colonial heritage. They are also characterized by a complex pattern of African first languages (mainly from the Bantu and Nilo-Saharan language families), a common lingua franca (Kiswahili), and a combination of Christian, Islamic and native African religious and cultural beliefs. The East African Community (1967-76, revived in 1997) is a sociopolitical expression of this common heritage.The neighboring countries in the north -Sudan, Ethiopia, and Somaliahave also experienced some English influences, but they have had their own special histories as well as linguistic and cultural traditions, especially a much more independent development and -in large parts -a more dominant Arabic influence, so that they are usually not considered ESL nations in Kachru's sense. The southern "Anglophone" neighbors -Zambia, Malawi, and Zimbabweare often (cf. Schmied, 1996) considered as "Central Africa" or even part of "Southern Africa" since they have been under a dominant impact from the south (including its native speakers of English) for over a century. This influence is engrained in the pronunciation (e.g., the long central vowel tending towards [a.], like girl as [ga.l]) and the lexicon (e.g., the typical SAfE robot for traffic light).

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A B s T R A m This article derives from the internal discussions of a project that has just been launched and which may provide a useful example of modem comparative linguistics: the International Corpus of English (ICE). It concentrates on the problems which arise when the principles of corpus compilation, which were developed in native communities (ENL corpora) in the pre-sociolinguistic age, are applied to non-native communities (ESL corpora) such as Africa. In my opinion this reveals a crucial difficulty in corpus compilation that has been neglected in most corpus-linguistic work: the contrast and relationship between variation according to use and that according to user, or between stylistic sampling categories based on text types and sociolinguistic ones based on speaker/writer identity. Examples of such problems will be derived from the second-language corpus I am primarily concerned with, the Corpus of East African English, but the principles of sociostylistic variation in native and non-native varieties of English go far beyond this immediate context. They aim at combining two modern quantitatively oriented linguistic subdisciplines to their mutual benefit. After a brief introduction to the ICE project the following points are dealt with: first, the uses of computer-readable corpora for modern grammars and dictionaries in general (Section 2) and for applied (Section 3) and theoretical (Section 4) research on non-native varieties of English in particular, then the text type approach applied in ENL corpora so far (Section 5) and the sociolinguistic dimension with its relationship to stylistic variation (Section 6), followed by practical considerations for Third World Englishes (Section 7), and finally a multidimensional approach to socio-stylistic variation (Section 8) which may be necessary for transferring the ENL-based methodology of corpus compilation to ESL varieties.