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| Phase | History and politics | Identity construction | Sociolinguistics of contact/use/attitudes | Linguistic developments/structural effects |
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| (1) Foundation | STL: colonial expansion: trade, military outposts, missionary activities, emigration/settlement IDG: occupation, loss/sharing of territory, trade | STL: part of original nation
IDG: indigenous | STL: cross-dialectal contact, limited exposure to local languages
IDG: minority bilingualism (acquisition of English) | STL: koineization; toponymic borrowing; incipient pidginization (in trade colonies) |
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| (2) Exonormative stabilization | Stable colonial status; English established as language of administration, law, (higher) education, … | STL: outpost of original nation, “British-plus-local”
IDG: individually “local-plus-British” | STL: acceptance of original norm; expanding contact
IDG: spreading (elite) bilingualism | Lexical borrowing (esp. fauna and flora, cultural terms); “-isms”; pidginization/creolization (in trade/plantation colonies) |
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| (3) Nativization | Weakening ties; often political independence but remaining cultural association | STL: permanent resident of British origin
IDG: permanent resident of indigenous origin | Widespread and regular contacts, accommodation
IDG: common bilingualism, toward language shift, L1 speakers of local English
STL: sociolinguistic cleavage between innovative speakers (adopting IDG forms) and conservative speakers (upholding external norm; “complaint tradition”) | Heavy lexical borrowing;
IDG: phonological innovations (“accent,” possibly due to transfer); structural nativization, spreading from IDG to STL: innovations at lexis-grammar interface (verb complementation, prepositional usage, constructions with certain words/word classes), lexical productivity (compounds, derivation, phrases, semantic shifts); code mixing (as identity carrier) |
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| (4) Endonormative stabilization | Postindependence, self-dependence (possibly after “Event X”) | (member of) new nation, territory-based, increasingly pan-ethnic | Acceptance of local norm (as identity carrier), positive attitude to it; (residual conservatism); literary creativity in new variety | Stabilization of new variety, emphasis on homogeneity, codification: dictionary writing, grammatical description |
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| (5) Differentiation | Stable young nation, internal sociopolitical differentiation | Group-specific (as part of overarching new national identity | Network construction (increasingly dense group; internal interactions) | Dialect birth: group-specific (ethnic, regional, social) varieties emerge (as L1 or L2) |
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