The modal <i>shall</i> is still alive and well in East African English

Abstract For several decades the use of the modal shall has been reported to be inexorably declining, especially in Inner Circle varieties of English. Some authors have even talked of its demise outside legal texts. This article set out to argue that inexorable decline and demise do not apply to the fortunes of shall in three East African varieties of English, namely, Kenyan, Tanzanian and Ugandan English. The literature reports that the decline of shall has benefitted its main competitor, will . Because of this, will is taken as the reference in the statistical models used in the present study to establish the usage of shall over the last three decades in the three East African varieties, with British English, their common colonial ancestor, being taken as the reference in the same statistical analyses. These were based on data drawn from the International Corpus of English and the Corpus of Global Web‐Based English . They involved chi‐square tests of the overall frequencies of occurrence of shall and will and binomial logistic regression tests of models with fixed effects and those with interactions. Statistically significant findings indicate that shall was proportionally more frequent in East African English than in British English, with the main source of difference in usage being the much greater use of shall with third‐person subjects in the three East African varieties. This usage was corroborated even further by qualitative data analysis of a selection of legal texts, newspaper articles and official administrative texts. With all these three types of texts being more recent than the two corpora, this article concludes that even though corpus data do indeed point to a diachronic decline of shall even in East African English, shall is still alive and well in certain registers of it.