Cases where it is undeniable that speakers of the mother language came in contact with speakers of other languages which disappeared but left substrate influence on the superseding language have been treated as rather exceptional. Such is the case of the Romance languages, which developed from Vulgar Latin. More often than not, only internally motivated linguistic processes have been invoked to account for the evolution of the mother language into its offspring. Thus little is usually said about the contributions of Celtic languages to the structures of Romance languages.
Thus, as far as English as spoken by descendants of Europeans is concerned, it has been normal not to discuss whether or not it has been influenced by its Celtic substratum in England. Likewise, experts have seldom addressed the question of why Celtic influence in British varieties of English is confined to those which developed after the Old-English period and why it is perhaps most striking today in those which developed since the seventeenth century (in particular Irish and Scots-Irish Englishes). Other varieties that bear such conspicuous influence are those outside Europe whose developers included speakers of Irish and Scots-Irish Englishes.
According to Michael Montgomery's 1989 article "Exploring the Roots of Appalachian English," Appalachian English is one of these non-British varieties with Celtic influence. Newfoundland vernacular English (NVE) is another where such substrate influence is to be expected, despite linguist Sandra Clarke's capitalization on the Southwestern English sources of some of its grammatical features such as the HABITUAL verbal {S} suffix. She provides no explanation for the usage of be (bees in the third person singular, e.g. "he bees...") before nonverbal predicates for the same grammatical function. I conjecture that perhaps congruence with a similar, though not necessarily identical, pattern in Gaelic influenced this development in NVE.
In the case of Irish and Scots-Irish Englishes, the evidence from research since the 1980s shows that contact with the substratum cannot be denied. Similarities between some (Scots) Irishisms and Gaelic in just those areas that distinguish them from more Germanic varieties of British English make contact a plausible, if not the only, explanation for these divergent evolutionary paths of English. But then one may raise the question of why these new varieties are characterized as "native," despite the influence of Gaelic.
The main reason is that the communities of those speaking these new varieties as vernaculars consist (almost) entirely of native speakers. To be sure, they must have been indigenizing during some phases of their developments. Given the acknowledged role of contact, one may ask why they are not called creoles, especially their nonstandard varieties. After all, creoles are considered native varieties, at least according to the most traditional and most widely accepted definition of the term creole in linguistics. They are also native according to a characterization little noticed in Robert Hall's 1966 book Pidgin and Creole Languages, namely, they are indigenous to the places where they developed. In this respect, they are like Scots and Irish Englishes, as well as like indigenized Englishes. To be equally subversive, why are creoles called separate languages for that matter? Since "creolization" is not a structural process and most of the features identified as Irish and Scottish are primarily nonstandard and are due to language contact, it requires some innocence not to consider the race and/or geographical location of the speakers an important tacit factor in the naming tradition. Indigenized or native English?
South Africa is an interesting case, where the English spoken by descendants of Europeans (including Afrikaners) is said to be "native," whereas the varieties spoken by other South Africans are said to be indigenized, reflecting the many-tiered colonial sociopolitical ecology of the country.
Perhaps an interesting exception here is South African Indian vernacular English (SAIE). The reason for not including it among indigenized Englishes is that it is nonstandard and did not develop through the scholastic medium. It is not typically identified as a creole either, though it developed under conditions which may lead some scholars to characterize it as such. It certainly is not considered "native." One reason why, unlike Irish and Scots vernacular Englishes, it does not count as "native" seems to be the following: it counts no people of European descent among its native speakers. Technically, SAIE has "fallen between the cracks," as it fits into none of the ill-conceived categories assumed in accounts of speciation of the English language.
In the same vein, one may want to speculate whether there will ever be a time when, for instance, Indian, Singaporean, and Nigerian Englishes may become native. Shouldn't we rather accept the reality that English is less likely to replace the indigenous lingua francas of these territories than it did in Wales, Ireland, and Scotland, because the socioeconomic and political ecologies are not the same? The case of SAIE is a special one, chiefly because the appropriation of English among Indians in South Africa enabled both wider communication among themselves and communication with non-Indians, especially the British colonists who brought them there.
It is also interesting that the varieties identified as "indigenized" are spoken in former exploitation colonies. South Africa was partly a settlement colony, like the territories where creoles have typically developed, and partly an exploitation colony, especially where the British rule is concerned.
Outside the UK, native Englishes are also spoken in former settlement colonies, in which globalizing economic policies have at least endangered the indigenous languages, starting with the Celtic languages in the British Isles. The development of SAIE is associated to some extent with such ecological factors, although these did not obtain in quite the same ways as in the New World. One may argue that SAIE fits among native Englishes but, to my knowledge, no expert has classified it as such. Note also that English creoles are native vernaculars, but not necessarily native Englishes, based on the literature on both creoles and indigenized Englishes. If one had to slavishly follow this misguided tradition, another category would have to be invented for SAIE!
Some may speculate that native Englishes have well-established norms and are associated with some standard. Ironically, indigenized Englishes are in several structural respects no more distant from standard English varieties than native nonstandard vernaculars are. In a way, the educated varieties of indigenized Englishes represent local standards. The question to address is actually whether indigenized Englishes lack norms. I argue that, like expanded pidgins, indigenized Englishes do have stable norms, although these have been established and perpetuated by populations of primarily non-native speakers.
Such realities show that norms are not necessarily developed by native speakers but by a stable population of speakers who use a variety regularly. Norms emerge out of communicative habits of individual speakers. What the habits share, including patterns of variation, form the community's norms, i.e., manners in which a speaker can expect other members of their community to express things. Thus, the "native"/"non-native" distinction as applied to language varieties, rather than to speakers, seems to serve some social ideology more than it sheds any light on language evolution, especially on the speciation that often ensues from it.
