We explore how English is implicated in local language practices in the Netherlands, where English has limited official status, and in Japan, where it has no significant role in transactional communication at all. English in these contexts has typically been constructed as a “foreign” or “international” language, precluding consideration of the increasingly complex and multifarious ways it is mobilized for local interpersonal functions and the performance of identity. We present two specific analytic examples from the mediascapes of the two countries. Sociolinguistic and discourse-analytic analyses of our data show how English is tied up with the construction of the self and the other in different, profound, and sometimes unexpected ways. Although the prevailing English-language ideologies are almost polar opposites – the Japanese are typically constructed in the Japanese national imagination as “English-incompetent,” in contrast with the broad “English-knowing” identity in the Netherlands – in both contexts the use of English as a global linguistic resource creates new semiotic opportunities for social actors to negotiate and revise their identities and strategically construct the local.

From a uniformitarian perspective, I interpret the emergence of Old English as the outcome of colonization and language contact. Likewise, I argue that its spread and speciation into so many varieties around the world, including creoles and pidgins, are consequences of different instances of colonization, which varied according to whether this involved settlement, exploitation, or trade. Each colonization style produced a different population structure, which in turn influenced how the language was appropriated and restructured by its non-heritage speakers. In England itself, one must invoke how the colonization of the land by other European nations subjected the language to the superstrate influence of the colonizers, who shifted to it. Ecological factors such as population structure (which determine patterns of social interactions and language transmission) and periodization (associated with particular moments of language shift or appropriation) help account for the differential evolution of English around the world.